Militarized Budgets + Toys For Boys = War Without End

Sen. John McCain introduced a bill this week to block the automatic cuts to military spending that were part of the deficit compromise by Congress. There's a similar bill in the House.  ==>Take action against the madness, or get talking points and letter to editor tips and Abby Shahn's great example here.

Who'll make up the $$ difference? Federal workers -- if McCain gets his way. Hey, wasn't he running to be the top federal worker awhile back? I suppose there are things a senator can say that a candidate for POTUS can't.

Lincoln famously said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." Presidents with one foot out the door of the Oval Office sometimes experience a burst of candor, and stop trying to fool anybody: in 1960 Dwight D. Eisenhower calledl out the “military-industrial complex,” warning his fellow taxpayers about the threat it posed to both their solvency and their sovereignty.

President Obama, nearing the end of his first term, and hoping for a second, can afford no such truth telling. Instead, Obama used the bully pulpit to deliver a stump speech disguised as a State of the Union address, the theme of which was rah rah military.

The military-industrial complex could be the poster child for people's disgust with the best government corporate lobbyists can buy. Turn over the rock of $669 billion that Congress and the President just authorized for next year's military expenses, and what comes scurrying out? Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman and General Dynamics campaign contributions, that's what. CEOs of those companies command such obscene levels of wealth that they aren't even the 1%, they're the 0.01%.

The fact is that the union is in a dreadful state, with millions of citizens unemployed, foreclosed, and in debt up to their eyebrows for college degrees that only lead to part-time McJobs. Tens of thousands nationwide have taken to the streets calling for an end to corporate control of government and the politics of unbridled greed. Since September 17 on Wall Street – and as recently as last month during the New Hampshire Primary – Occupy crowds have chanted: “How do we fix the deficit? End the wars and tax the rich!”

Pandering to as many voters as possible, Obama delivered a flag waving, chest thumping paean to U.S. military might and global dominance that included a tiny call to reduce military funding in favor of debt service and generating jobs via housing starts: “In the next few weeks, I will sign an Executive Order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects. But you need to fund these projects. Take the money we're no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.”

The fact that Secretary of Defense Panetta immediately followed the SOTU address by promising to reduce the proposed Pentagon budget over the next decade is not the point. Neither is the fact that they're cutting back on troops, not the uber expensive drones which cost a minimum of $2 million per crash. (And yes, they crash quite often.) The point is that the Obama and Panetta feel compelled to claim to be reducing military spending in order to ward off regime change.

It's a sign of the times. Ron Paul is spooking both Democrats and Republicans by calling to reduce spending on foreign military adventures, a position he took long before he was officially in campaign mode. On his website currently we find: “Acting as the world’s policeman and nation-building weakens our country, puts our troops in harm’s way, and sends precious resources to other nations in the midst of an historic economic crisis.Taxpayers are forced to spend billions of dollars each year to protect the borders of other countries...”

Don't get me wrong, I have no fondness for Ron Paul. His anti-immigrant stance would have us spending plenty on military measures to “protect” our own border. But some people are on the verge of letting themselves be fooled into thinking he's a peace candidate rather than an old-fashion fiscal conservative.

From the other end of the spectrum Rep. Chellie Pingree toots her horn for voting “no” on so-called defense spending. (Never mind that she voted “ought to pass” when the National Defense Authorization Act was still in the committee. Her website explains: "The situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate with no end in site(sic)... It's time to stop funding the war ...As we struggle to get budget deficits under control, we have to come to grips with the fact that nearly one-quarter of the deficits that have been run up since 2003 are the result of war spending.”

Is this what the U.S. public understands about the connection between the endless war on terror and ongoing economic distress? The U.S. Conference of Mayors voted last June to send a resolution to Washington calling for reductions in military spending in order to fund the critical needs of big cities. A lively floor debate in advance of the vote became the focus of media coverage of the entire conference, which is an annual effort to influence federal policies impacting urban areas.

Apparently spending more than half of the discretionary budget (i.e. income tax revenues) each year on what the Pentagon wants -- while failing to fund essential services – was enough to make big city mayors take an unusual stand. It's the first time they have even debated military spending since the war in Vietnam even though the choice is ever guns or butter, so you'd think mayors would talk about it every year. Who do mayors work for?

Oakland Police at work for Mayor Jean Quan, who traveled to Wash DC to confer with the federal govt and other big city officials about OWS and affiliates. Occupy Oakland is shown being evicted October 2011, probably the event that sparked all the ensuing big strikes and port shutdowns.

The man who swept into office last time around on the promise of hope and change will deliver campaign speeches with a little bit of something for everybody: the continued glory of the mighty U.S. military, with maybe a little funding shaved off to keep construction workers from rioting in the streets. And the man who didn't get the job will keep working on behalf of the Pentagon, too. 

Meanwhile, people who have to choose between rent, food, or health care – and who may have loved ones on deployment, or just back from combat – are getting harder to fool even some of the time.

GOOD READ:

 The Military-Industrial Complex at 50, based on the national conference of the same title held October, 2011 in Virginia.

See what Bradley Manning started?

As mostly oldsters considered the stranglehold of military spending on the nation and wondered what to do about it at the MIC at 50 conference in Charlottesville last weekend, mostly youngsters began the occupation of Wall St. that mimics the Arab spring. Will it grow to Cairo proportions? I hope so. It contains many of the same elements including good grassroots organization, police harassment, and splendid chanting (e.g. Banks got bailed out, We got sold out!).

Sixty thousand marched against nuclear power and weapons in Tokyo, causing the alarm of Japan's prime minister to manifest by minimizing the demonstration as a "parade." Mie and Steve Ahearn completed their 200 mile march from Rockland, Maine to Boston where they presented a petition to the Japanese consul, calling for the government to protect children and pregnant women being exposed to ongoing radiation from Fukushima.

We march where we find ourselves.

Organizing continues apace for Washington DC Oct 6 and beyond. From Starwhawk, one of the co-founders of CODEPINK, comes this invitation to join the Pagan Cluster:

Where: Freedom Plaza, Washington DC
Focal day: October 6
We'll gather and work our magic October 3–8.  Come for an hour, come for a day, come for as long as you can.
Contact us at: pagancluster2011@gmail.com

The Wheel is turning.  The veil is growing thin. Around the world the people are rising, calling for freedom, claiming their power.  Can you hear Mama Gaia calling - calling us to serve Life?

I'll be supporting from the back benches until I can get down there myself. (Actually, Wall St. is a lot closer.)

As for why thousands and millions of people are giving up on reform, and getting together to start a people's movement for nonviolent change, here's just a smattering of related news from the last few days: the US is setting up drone bases all over northern Africa and the Arab peninsula; NATO night raids have increased dramatically -- and are likely making the situation in Afghanistan worse by fanning the flames of violent insurgency; Obama claims we need to cut Medicare and Social Security to fund the inevitableness of wars; and Troy Davis was put to death yesterday in a travesty of justice that once more demonstrates that the war at home is a war on the poor, the non-white, and -- incidentally -- is highly profitable.

See what Bradley Manning started?

The Military-Industrial Complex at 50, Charlottesville

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.

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RESOURCES:

Link to Bring Our War $$ Home GAME proposal where you can give feedback http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MYNV9RY

Maine Statewide Bring Our War $$ Home Campaign

CODEPINK National Bring Our War $$ Home Campaign

National Priorities Project on federal budget categories http://nationalpriorities.org/en/tools/tradeoffs

wars in Iraq amp; Afghanistan costofwar.com

Robert Naiman “Why the Jobs Argument Against Military Cuts is Bogus” (published at Truthout.com) http://www.truth-out.org/why-jobs-argument-against-military-cuts-bogus/1313598273

Bombs & Budgets Curriculum Teaching Guide (by War Resisters' League et al.):

http://warisacrime.org/content/bombs-and-budgets-curriculum-teaching-guide

Phyllis Bennis, IPS “End Wars Fact Sheet” for Rebuild the Dream 3.moveon.org/pdfs/fact_sheet_end_wars.pdf 

 

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.
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Global elites "seceding into space"

Last night I watched this incredible interview with author Arundhati Roy where she spoke with Alternative Radio's David Barsamian about what a globalized military-industrial complex looks like in her home country of India. While discussing the particular case of Kashmir she observed that all over the world the young and the dispossessed are in revolt and rebellion against wealthy elites who distance themselves by "seceding into space."


The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space is an international group keeping tabs on on what President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about, the for-profit weapons industry. In 2011 this looks more like a weapons-logistics-spying-reconstruction industry, a sector which is growing while the overall U.S. economy falters. Bruce Gagnon will address a conference on “The Military-Industrial Complex at 50” to be held September 16-18 at Piedmont Virginia Community College, where I will also be on hand to lead a federal budget activity. Here he answers questions about the upcoming conference:

Why are you going to the MIC at 50 conference in Charlottesville? What will you talk about, and why do you think a conference on this theme is worthwhile?

I will share what I know about the Pentagon's plans to make America's primary role under corporate globalization a thing they call "security export.” With three wars going on these days, costing $10 billion every month just in Afghanistan, I can't sit back and watch social progress in America wither on the vine of neglect and militarism. So I need to be with serious people who are engaged in trying to stop this domestic and foreign policy madness. We need to come together from all over the nation to share information and flesh out alternative, transformative visions for the future – rather than the present madness of endless war and corporate profits.

We are up against big corporate power that wants to control the declining resources on the planet, and they want our kids to fight their wars for them. I've got to stay in the thick of it because I want the next generation to have a future.

You mentioned the globalization of the MIC. Could you give an example?

The U.S. has determined that we won't be able to compete with China's economy. So the Pentagon has developed a strategy that says, if we can just control China's access to resources like oil, then we will control the keys to their economic engine. For the past dozen years the Pentagon has been doubling our military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

A key element is the porting of Navy Aegis destroyers outfitted with so-called "missile defense" systems on-board, surrounding China's coast. They are made at Bath Iron Works where I live in Maine (the cost of the ships just doubled from $1.5 billion each to $3 billion), and the U.S. needs more ports near China to dock the growing numbers of ships.



The U.S. is twisting the arm of the right-wing South Korean government to build a Navy base on Jeju Island, which is just off the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, right smack dab in the Yellow Sea, along the water route China uses to import 80% of their oil. The farming and fishing village on Jeju Island is in revolt because construction of the base will ruin their way of life. People there are using hunger strikes, and sitting in front of trucks intended to cover the rocky coastline with cement. People are going to jail for their non-violent actions, and the Global Network has been helping to build support for them around the world.

Recently you were part of protests against the Pentagon's Blue Angels air show, which uses 48,600 gallons of fuel a weekend, and churns out tons of greenhouse gases into our already stressed environment. How much longer will people in a tight economy put up with this kind of blatant waste and pollution?

People are stirred up about all this war spending and severe cutbacks in human needs programs but we have a corporate arterial blockage of the heart of our democracy. We have mostly corporate-owned media, and Congress is largely under the control of these same corporate entities. So people are not sure what to do – they feel depressed and disempowered. That's why this conference is so important.

Last June the Global Network held a conference here in the U.S. with international participation. What came out of this event?

It was a chance for key activists from around the world to get together and share the latest info on U.S. space domination plans. The main thing that came home to us was the extraordinary cost of the Pentagon plan to militarize space. Some years ago, one of the aerospace industry publications said they were sending their lobbyists to Washington to "secure a stable funding source for their space plans" identified as the "entitlement programs." Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are the social programs the military-industrial complex identified for defunding so they could afford to pay for space-directed warfare.

It's like two trains heading toward one another on a collision course. Endless war, or social progress – which one do the people really want?

The Global Network is organizing Keep Space for Peace week Oct 1-8. What do you see as key events during this time period? Why are they important?


Local events around the world will help build a public consciousness about how space technology directs all warfare on the Earth today -- no matter whether you are a troop on the ground, in a tank, on a plane, or on a ship, everything is directed from military satellites in space. The Space Command is saying that the U.S. must "control and dominate" space and "deny" other countries access to space so that we can be the "Master of Space." The next step is to build anti-satellite weapons so the U.S. can destroy other countries' satellites. It's all very expensive, dangerous and provocative.

It's creating a new arms race in space – which is just fine with the aerospace industry. In the end they make a lot of money while the people lose funding for public education, health care, and infrastructure. The only jobs left will be fighting in wars for the corporate oligarchy – unless we stop this. The Achilles heel is the cost, but I've learned never to underestimate the MIC.

You've been focusing on the need to “keep space for peace” for 27 years now. How do you understand the importance of this goal, at different levels?

It's the future....we either stop the arms race into space or we become a feudal society, it's really quite that simple.

I owe my own personal transformation to those few activists holding signs outside the gates of my base in California on weekends during the Vietnam War. I saw how it energized the 15,000 GI's on my base to debate the war endlessly in the barracks at night, in the chow hall, and on our jobs during the day.

I believe in protest and I believe that creating experiences for people through public actions helps them think and grow. Nothing changes people like their own personal experiences. So I remain dedicated to creating opportunities for ordinary, good-hearted people to have political experiences.

Your work on the Bring Our War $$ Home campaign continues at the local and national level. How does this campaign connect the dots?

We are making people think about where their money is going, and at the same time giving them information to help them imagine how their wasted money could have been used doing something good. Taxpayers in State of Virginia have paid $31.1 billion for total war spending (Iraq plus Afghanistan) since 2001. Just imagine how that money could have been used in Virginia.

It's the same all over the nation. We wouldn't be in this fiscal mess if we hadn't been in these wars for the past 10 years. I just read they want to extend our troops in Afghanistan until 2024. How will we pay for that? It's insane. People are waking up to this nonsense. It's time for folks to rattle their chains. We've become slaves to the military-industrial complex.
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For more information on “MIC at 50 - A National Conference in Charlottesville, VA” visit MIC50.org