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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Domestic Insecurity

One in five children in the U.S. officially live in poverty now. In cities, the figure climbs to as high as two out of five. How shameful this seems to me, in light of the money pouring out of our pockets and into the highly profitable business of war. In Charlottesville, VA, for example, taxpayers will be asked to contribute $63.3 million to the Pentagon budget, which would provide 27,933 low-income kids with health care next year.

The mainstream press is increasingly taking notice of the high costs of endless war, as if it had taken a decade to wake up and smell the red ink. Many who don't believe in social progress are joining the antiwar chorus. They don't want to save money in order to, for instance, give 6,414 university students scholarships for a year -- they just want to save money, period.

But how will young people ever pull themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps if they can't read and write competently? For the two decades I've been a public school teacher, every national assessment of future needs concludes that, to compete successfully for the dwindling number of jobs available, students will need at least a high school diploma plus some kind of post-secondary training. Yet public education, chronically underfunded for decades, is again on the chopping block -- with schools closing, teachers laid off, and class sizes climbing. University tuition is skyrocketing from New York to California. Summer job training programs for youth were also cut in lots of the most economically disadvantaged places. (As had been done also in London, Liverpool and Manchester, with riotous results.)

Food insecurity is already at the doorstep of many who thought they were educated enough, or secure enough -- homeowners with careers that brought the elusive health care benefits, suddenly laid off after decades, unable to find a job in their field. Students with enormous debt from their college degrees, working for minimum wage at jobs with no benefits, barely able to make the rent and their education loan payments. Families who had a member with a disease or injury they could ill afford, in foreclosure. Soup kitchens and food cupboards are swamped like never before. And the federal food stamp program, morphed into something called SNAP, now takes weeks or months to apply for.

The federal government's response? Start practicing for urban warfare, apparently. The Jamaica Plain Gazette reported that the U.S. Special Operations Command landed a military helicopter on the roof of a closed elementary school after dark last week in a poor residential area of Boston. No notice was given to the alarmed neighbors, watching men in combat gear descend onto the roof of the building where their children used to go to school.

“We’re from Special Operations,” (spokeswoman) Tiscione acknowledged, referring to the umbrella organization of all four military branches’ special forces. “I’m kind of being vague on purpose. It’s more of a challenge for us when people know who we are.”

(Hey, aren't they the same Special Ops reported to  be carrying out assassinations and renditions in 70 countries worldwide -- without any Congressional oversight?)

Domestic insecurity*, indeed. What are people to do? Burning down buildings doesn't solve much and leaves a poor neighborhood even poorer. Some young people are getting organized, mobbing sites of police brutality like BART subway stations in San Francisco-- and having their cell phones shut down by authorities (but that's another story).

Then there are vibrant cultural responses to rage. CODEPINK's campaign to Create, Note Hate supports artful expressions of what ten years of "war on terror" has brought, and what alternatives might look, sound and feel like, part of a national effort called 10 Years and Counting. Maybe you could get a few hundred friends together and create a dance expressing your yearning for the opportunities offered by higher education like these college students in Chile:

You could write a book, like Buggy, the young adult novel I co-authored about about the poverty draft, and what really turns kids on. You can read a sample on Amazon.


You could help occupy Freedom Plaza in DC this October 6 and beyond. You could organize a Bring Our War $$ Home Care-a-Van to tour your state, finding out what budget cuts have done to your neighborhoods, and how small those are in comparison to the funds lavished on building weapons.

You could study and teach about nonviolent methods of effecting change. Because children living in poverty need ALL of us to pull together and create a better future for the world.

* Domestic Insecurity is a name I lifted from my creative friends the Three Monkeys Art Collective, from their 2004 installation at Fitchburg Art Museum. Grateful for the artists!

"the public is stunned and listless"

A quote from one of my favorite blogs, Organizing Notes by Bruce Gagnon:

At the same time we witness the "big deal" that was cut in Washington DC last night to "save the federal government from shutdown". The deal will slash another $40 billion from social programs as the Republican controlled House of Representatives, the Democrats, and Obama continue their relentless assault on social progress. This $40 billion is equal to what the Pentagon spends on the Afghanistan occupation in about three months. But we are not supposed to notice. 

In many respects the public is stunned and listless.

Abu Graib prisoner tortured by U.S. troops, as ordered by their officers. The release of these photos is what sent my husband and I back to vigil every week on the bridge where we first met, just before Shock & Awe.

I was stunned this week when a colleague invited me into his class to observe a lesson that is part of a unit on WWII. Studying the rise of Nazi Germany, the students were taking up the question, How can people participate in horrors like being concentration camp guards? Or just stand by silently while their government does such things?

One of the things the class considered was research psychologist Philip Zimbardo on the nature of systemic evil. Here you can see his lecture which raised the central questions: Are there intrinsically bad apples? Do bad barrels make bad apples? And if so, who or what makes the bad barrels?
My colleague warned the class, both at the beginning and then again right before the video, that they would be seeing graphic images of torture and abuse from Abu Graib prison in Iraq. The students were given permission to not view the images; no one left the room, but I did notice one girl looking down at her desk.

Most of the students are in the 10th grade and by chance this section of the class on Modern World Studies was full of able students who value their own learning. I've had them all in class before, and I knew this about them. They were relatively quiet during the class I observed, but there was some discussion, and it appeared they were paying attention.

At the end of the period there were a few minutes left, and I wondered aloud how many were seeing the Abu Graib photos for the first time. Answer that left me stunned: all of them. The whole class of about twenty teenagers had not only never seen any of the Abu Graib photos but THEY HAD NEVER HEARD OF ABU GRAIB. At all.

I am stunned. But I will be damned if I am listless.

Most of the teachers I've discussed this with reference the fact that they grew up discussing current events with their parents. That was back in the days when families had dinner together. Also the days when the news had a little bit more real information in it.

Nowadays, ten thousand Muslims and their allies could march down Broadway in the middle of a Saturday in NYC, and the New York Times could completely ignore it. (The Portland Press Herald completely ignored a large immigration march I joined in Maine a couple of years ago, also.)

So before I go off to my day job, I will do my second job, spreading real news. This report is from Peter Titus, who attended both the April 9 NYC antiwar march full of Muslim families for peace, and a same day labor rally in Times Square. I think it was scheduled for the same time deliberately to compete with the antiwar march, which began being organized last July when a date was set, and was attended largely by those who didn't vote for Obama the first time -- and have no intention of even pretending to support the Democratic Party.

Having attended both events (I stopped by the Times Square labor event around 12:30 PM) my observation is that the short, punchy labor gathering attracted around 6,000-7,000.  I counted about 1,500 per packed "pen" of which there were three between 42nd and 39th streets, plus 500 in the way-back "pen" and another 1,500 along the other side of the street comprised of "pen-free" people.  The participants were overwhelming union members. The theme was "stop the war against workers". I don't recall any of the speakers offering a way to actually stop this war, however the audience was big, militant, and ready for action. By comparison, our antiwar march an hour later  was attended by a huge throng, easily twice the size of the labor event.  I could not say it was more energetic or more willing to put up a fight because both groups scored hight points here according to my unofficial scorecard. The large turnout was probably the result of extensive outreach, especially involving at the Muslim community. In contrast to the labor event, our event also offered a way forward for working people by demanding an end to the wars and occupations. Both events shared one thing in common: they were completely ignored by the N.Y. Times which failed to mention either milestone event.

The mainstream press ignored this event also. Maine State House Hall of Flags, April 4, 2011 rally to bring our war $$ home.