War Funding Rolls On -- What To Do About It

source: USA Today Obamas greet military families in Hawaii

Please join me in considering some New Year's Resolutions: Get the word out about war spending vs. budget cuts. Blog, tweet, get in your local paper, write letters to the editor, reprint other people's op-eds -- like this beauty from Betsy Crites, North Carolina Peace Action Director, which ran with the title "Bring the war dollars home" in the Durham Herald-Sun (thanks to Jacqui Deveneau for sharing).

Ok, that's a partial action list for 2012. But right now, still 2011, President Obama has neither signed nor vetoed $600+ billion for continued military expansion in the coming year, and the gravest attacks on civil liberties since the McCarthy era, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It's not too late!

Call the White House 9am-5pm EST Switchboard: 202-456-1414
24 hour automated comments recording: 202-456-1111

Other things I plan to do in 2012:

• Keep reading (while we still have the Internet). Here's a good article I started yesterday: "Economic Downturn Took a Detour at Capital Hill" by Eric Lichtblau in the NYT via Common Dreams. It's about how banks got bailed out, we got sold out -- and our "representatives" in Congress got wealthy in the process.

• Help wage a vigorous campaign against impending Internet censorship (SOPA is the House version of the bill, PIPA is the Senate version).

• Help people stay in their already occupied homes by resisting the next cascading millions of foreclosures.

• Join a planning meeting for the statewide Bring Our War $$ Home campaign on Sat. Jan 14 at noon in Augusta.

• Lend CODEPINK Maine support to the Union of Maine Visual Artists celebrating a creative response to the Occupy movement that has swept the planet, and is still rolling on gathering momentum. Sat. Jan 21 (snow day Sun. Jan 22) Draw-a-Thon at Harlow Gallery in Hallowell. Are you an artist? No need to wait until Jan. 21. Start creating now!

• Join a statewide meeting to assess the Occupy movement in Maine, and to consider which paths look productive and likely for the near future. Sat Jan. 28, 9am-4:30pm (snow date: Jan 29)  Randall Student Center, U/Maine, Augusta. FMI  rosc@psouth.net Larry Dansinger, (207) 525-7776.

Night Raids, Mall Attacks, BOA Internal Memos

Here's my question. So when Homeland Security's Urban Shield kicked into gear all over our nation – how did they plan on handling the lawsuits that will result from things like a petite woman happening upon a mall antiwar demo in Austin, TX, briefly holding someone's sign, and getting three broken ribs for it? Pepper spray in NYC and then Davis, tear gas canisters in Oakland, batons everywhere, cherry pickers, ropes and ladders in Wash DC.

Won't a lot of judges have a lot to say about a lot of this thuggery on the part of police -- eventually? It's clear corporations own the Supreme Court, but does the 1% think it controls the entire judiciary?

Hooray for LA, which passed the first city resolution I've heard of to overturn the Citizens United ruling! Corporations are not people, is one of the core beliefs of the 99%.

Militarized urban police departments turning out against unarmed, nonviolent protestors hasn't looked good, and there will be a raft of lawsuits – at the taxpayer's expense. This is the sort of thing community policing was supposed to address. There have been mass actions with police violence prior to this, and the chief of police of one of them, in Seattle, has now recanted, but I think we have clearly entered a new phase. Homeland Security is giving out tanks for “free” to cities.

This is what comes of taking lessons from the skilled and brutal security forces from Israel and Bahrain. Top cops all over the globe are putting their heads together at secretive meetings, and the result is cops start aiming “non-lethal” tear gas canisters directly at people's heads, as they have been doing for years at West Bank demos. Scott Olsen became an instant hero of the revolution by getting his skull cracked at Occupy Oakland, as we all saw the dramatic images of his companions rushing to his aid. Bradley Manning has been there all along as a dramatic victim, too, and will finally get his first day in court next week. I wonder if he knows how much of a celebrity he is. It's clear he knew he was doing the right thing, but he wouldn't have known he would get so famous.

Stuff people were allowed to pick up after Zucotti Park raid. photo: Mel, Codepink NYC

So people are getting evicted over and over again, losing their stuff, their laptops, disrupting their lives even more than the meltdown of the economy as we knew it – which continues apace.

This week an internal memo showed Bank of America recognizes it has a p.r. problem around foreclosures, as the 99% turned from the cold, raided streets toward occupying foreclosed or threatened buildings. 

Nonviolent methods needed now, more than ever. Let's win! (The video I wanted to use here, of UC Davis students' powerful use of silence on the university chancellor ,has 1 million+ views.)

Occupy Foreclosures, Not Afghanistan

Radiantly soggy Codepink Mel and friends at a Brooklyn action to Occupy Foreclosures today, Dec. 6. Her report: “Huge crowd..ppl leaning out of windows cheering us on.”

Right on, Mel. What are we funding right now, as news rolls out of the militarization of U.S. municipal police who get “free” -- i.e. paid for by federal taxes rather than local -- tanks, guns, tear gas and pepper spray? (Note: After I published this post the original article I linked to in Business Insider was taken down. Now it's back up again. Read it here.)

And in the  U.S. taxpayers are also funding the ruling military council in Egypt, whose next big shipment of tear gas was blocked  by heroic workers in Suez. What are we funding as your Congress and mine vote this week on annual "defense" funding of a size so gargantuan it almost defies human scale?

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Occupying Foreclosed houses makes perfect sense at this point in the nascent Occupy movement. They both literally and figuratively make visible “the problem” between the banks and the 99%. So many folks were fraudulently turned out of their homes after their mortgage was sold repeatedly at no profit or benefit to them – while others lost their housing when a family member became ill and they fell behind in the payments – causing the U.S. corptocracy's failure to provide adequate health care to hit home in a doubly cruel way.

I think a performance of "I Will Survive (Capitalism)" would go just right at a foreclosure occupation, don't you? The t.v. crews would love it.

It appears there may be a partial retreat during winter of occupying outdoor spaces, at least once it gets truly cold. (50 and rainy today at the 45th parallel. Reminds me of Decembers in the SF Bay area, not New England.) Maybe some occupiers will even get locked up on purpose like freedom fighters have been known to do – housed, heated and fed at the government's expense while studying nonviolent methods, and planning for spring.

And when we re-emerge instead of grabbing rifles we will grab our friends and head out to follow the fine example of these Garfield High School students who occupied Seattle City Hall. "NO MORE CUTS!" "FOR THE FUTURE OF OUR NATION, PUT BACK FUNDING IN EDUCATION." As hundreds of chanting kids filled the stairs and flowed through city hall's doors, one observed, "This took 72 hours on Facebook."