Can Crony Capitalism Win Wars?

South China Morning Post

My husband is writing the next viral country song: "Try building hypersonic weapons in a country with subpar science." 

It may need some wordsmithing, but his concept is solid.

He was inspired after I showed him this tweet of the article above along with a selection of the comments:

https://twitter.com/thonwingp/status/1690904183195770881

"Inept H1B imports" refers to a special visa designation oft used by tech corporations to hire from outside the U.S. based on their claim that they can't find anyone in country who will accept low wages has the skills to do the job. (I'm not sure why Quaternion Group calls such workers inept -- could he do their jobs?) 

I would argue that the military-industrial industry is more likely to be brought to its knees by the poisoned seeds it contains within: crony capitalism.

When the head of your military has just resigned his seat on the board of Raytheon, you know he has friends in high places who expect him to scratch their back in return for having scratched his. White House, ditto. And then Congress multiplies this problem several hundred fold. For the past few years it has passed a Pentagon budget higher than what the Pentagon itself requested.

Try that in a small town.

Rep. Adam Smith chairs the House Armed Services Committee and is making a name for himself sharing opinion pieces like this:

The U.S. Department of Defense has spent tens of billions of dollars over the last 25 years on weapons systems that simply have failed to deliver as planned. These systems have wound up way over budget and have been either delivered exceptionally late or canceled outright after the DoD spent billions of dollars on them. Many of the programs that survive to completion, after long delays and cost overruns, have not delivered the capabilities initially desired and promised.

Not for the first time I'm reflecting on the role of late stage capitalism in defunding and privatizing public education. 

Finding the best math and science students and giving them all the free education they desire is what countries like Russia and China do. Here's what the U.S. does:

And, I'll just leave this artifact of reverse brain drain here:

From the International Business Times:

In April, Carl Schuster, a retired U.S. Navy captain and former director of operations at the Pacific Command's Joint Intelligence Center in Hawaii, conveyed to CNN that "submarines are one area where the United States retains unchallenged superiority over China."

But now it's being reported that a prestigious science journal in China published a study suggesting that existing technology could be used to successfully detect U.S. nuclear submarines. If it pans out, this could significantly affect U.S. military dominance of the world's oceans. 

And that would be a game changer, indeed.

Peacewashing The War In Ukraine

It's hard to argue with the view that NATO is a lot better at winning narrative competitions than it is at winning wars. From "How Nato seduced the European Left" by Lily Lynch on Unherd:

Previously, in the Nordic countries, Atlanticists have had to sell war and militarism to largely pacifist publics. This was achieved in part by presenting Nato not as a rapacious, pro-war military alliance, but as an enlightened, "progressive" peace alliance.

Fast forward to last week when a self-styled "peace summit" in Vienna produced the absurd statement shared above, eliciting the following statement from participant Magyar Békekör:

From the final text of the declaration issued by the International Peace Bureau, which emerged from obscurity, even the passage in the original draft, which mentioned NATO’s “co-responsibility”, was omitted.

In their closing statement, the organizers of the conference demand an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Civilian diplomatic intervention is envisaged at their countries’ embassies, including the Russian one, while condemning Russia.

The group organizing the peace conference did not demand the opinion of the participants in approving the final declaration, nor did they initiate an open discussion about it. At the end of the “peace summit” it was read aloud, as if meeting with everyone’s agreement. [emphasis mine]

Manufacturing consent for an ongoing war of choice by the U.S./NATO in Ukraine is not peace work, despite window dressing provided by the presence of luminaries of the Democratic Party-aligned "peace" movement in the U.S. like Joseph Gerson and Medea Benjamin.

Lynch, like many, sees the NATO war on the former Yugoslavia as a turning point.

Kosovo changed everything. In 1999 — the 50th anniversary of Nato’s founding — the alliance began what academic Merje Kuus has called a “discursive metamorphosis”. From the mere defensive alliance it was during the Cold War, it was becoming an active military compact concerned with spreading and defending values such as human rights, democracy, peace, and freedom well beyond the borders of its member states. The 78-day Nato bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia, ostensibly to halt war crimes committed by Serbian security forces in Kosovo, would forever transform the German Greens.

I remember a principal from a military family urging me to read a tome on "Responsibility to Protect" when he was my supervisor and I was teaching about genocides, around 2005. I thought the notion absurd at the time and quite possibly dangerous. 

Events in the decades since have shown my fear was not misplaced.

As some have argued persuasively, NATO's purpose is not to win wars but to generate profits for uber wealthy military-industrial titans that own and operate the U.S. government.

So what looks like failure to the general public e.g.

Documented equipment losses from Ukraine's spring offensive

looks like success to them e.g.

Peek into the stock portfolios of Congress or the Supreme Court and you'll see a built in incentive to keep pushing wars and never mind about winning, or even ending, them.

It gets worse. Lynch on new strategies to prey on younger people:

In February, Nato held its first ever gaming event. A young employee of the alliance joined popular Twitch streamer ZeRoyalViking to play Among Us and casually chat about the danger disinformation poses to democracy.* With them was a mountaineer influencer and environmental activist named Caroline Gleich. As their astronaut avatars navigated a cartoon spaceship, they spoke about Nato in glowing terms. By the event’s end, the stream had turned into a recruitment effort: the alliance employee talked about the perks of his job and encouraged viewers to check the Nato website for employment opportunities in fields such as graphic design and video editing.

I've written before about the hollowing out of major "peace" organizations here in the U.S., and about the role of major "environmental" organizations in maintaining consent for the Pentagon's climate crimes. 

This is the result of designating wars as Republican or Democratic Party projects: liberals hate the former while cheerleading for the latter. 

I'm part of a small group opposed to all of the U.S./NATO's many wars -- no matter what letter happens to be after the name of the person currently in the White House.

--

*My note: The "dangers of disinformation" is a signature trope of the DNC-social media-corporate media-narrative- management complex, which others have covered in depth here and here.

Corporations Mad For War While People Suffer Deprivation

Can the United Nations prevent another world war as it was created to do? Stay tuned. Photo: UN

Readers of this blog may recall that I once had a child born on Pearl Harbor Day in Tokyo, where I lived at the time. My Japanese friends did not know the Pearl Harbor Day reference. 

Me: You know, that was when the U.S. entered WW2 after Japan bombed their military site in Hawai'i. 

Them: Hmm, I may have heard something about that. (Note that they had all graduated from university in Japan.) 

Me: What day do Japanese people remember as significant in WW2?

Them: Hiroshima (duh).

Hiroshima after the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb in 1945  Source: nationalww2museum.org

Then I often asked a follow up question because I was truly curious. Why did Japan enter into a war where pilots were sent on suicide missions in planes built without landing gear in order to save dwindling resources?

The Japanese people did not want war, my Tokyo friends said. People were starving, they said. It was the zaibatsu that pursued conquest and war. 

Zaibatsu, (literally "financial clique"), were vertically integrated business conglomerates in the  Japanese empire with both industrial and financial branches.

Why do I bring this up now?

As we teeter on the brink of WW3, the zaibatsu of the U.S. empire push for war while controlling finance, media, social media, and what's left of our industrial base building weapons of mass destruction.

Their control of information streams is devastating as Democratic Party-aligned liberals and Republic Party-aligned conservatives alike cheerlead for sending billions in weapons and cash to Ukraine.

It is nearly impossible to find a glimmer of truth about extremely significant news of the contemporary slouch toward war.

The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were sabotaged by underwater explosives last week, and the corporate press in the U.S. and Europe blamed..Russia?

This is despite several facts on the ground such as: Victoria Nuland threatened the pipelines, Joe Biden threatened the pipelines, while Russia, an investor in the pipelines, could at any point simply turn off gas on their end. Reported Dave DeCamp in antiwar.com:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the attacks on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that connect Russia to Germany offer a “tremendous opportunity” to end Europe’s dependency on Russian energy.

Now Russian gas is bubbling up in the Baltic Sea, worthless, right in the spots where NATO conducted undersea war exercises last month.

Surface in Baltic Sea above leaking Nord Stream pipeline. Source: Reuters

But reporting that addresses the cui bono (who benefits?) is censored. 

(The practice run over Covid-19 information supression was awfully well-timed, was it not?)

Then there are the referenda in four eastern oblasts of Ukraine, which showed overwhelmingly (90%+) that people there want to join the Russian Federation.

In the corporate press the approved doublespeak for these votes is "sham." (It is telling when you encounter the very same adjectives over and over in numerous corporate-owned media outlets.)

The reports that claim the voting in every location was faked never bother to mention that two of the oblasts have been shelled by Ukraine for the past 8 years, resulting in 14,000 deaths, most of them Russian-speaking civilians. Russia intervened by attacking Ukraine's military which is waging war by proxy on behalf of NATO nations.

Why do I believe the voting was authentic? Because I follow several independent journalists who went there, observed the polls, interviewed people on the street, and reported on it. Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Beeley were both informative sources.

The UN Security Council failed to declare the referenda "illegal" when put to a vote last week.

Meanwhile, the wheels are coming off the kamikaze airplanes. 

The British pound and the euro are struggling along with their populations who face high rates of inflation, in many cases hunger, and a very cold winter ahead due to sanctions blocking Russian fuels they depended on. And even if they change their minds about the sanctions, the pipelines are defunct and will require months of repairs to be functional.

As if conditions weren't bad enough, the military-industrial-congressional-media complex is simultaneously gearing up to confront China, because that's the end game. 

Taking Russia out first, as a key ally to China, is the plan for world domination.

What day do you think your children will remember if they survive WW3?

We're Still Bombing Afghans = The War Is Not Over

Imagine for a moment that you're a person who loves a little child who was killed by aerial bombing, burnt to a crisp, by the U.S. military. It could be 1945, 1950, 1969, 1995, or pretty much any year in the 21st century.

"Malika Ahmadi, two, died in a U.S. drone strike on Kabul today, her family says. Has the war of 20 years cost us the ability to care?" Source: David Swanson, Pressenza

Now imagine that it just happened yesterday. And that the U.S. corporate press is proclaiming that the war they've been waging for decades on your country is "over."

That the U.S. corporate press lies for a living -- right out in the open -- makes no difference to you in your grief.

It mostly makes a difference to the taxpayers and voters of the country thousands of miles away where citizen are sold horseshit like, "We've got to fight terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

The lies that sell wars and buy elected officials use bogus concepts and slogans like "The war on terror" to incite fear and make compliance much easier than opposition.

A few people will go on social media platforms that are heavily censored in favor of corporate rule to express the truth laced with dark humor.

Well I think we can probably call it now and say that Terror has won the War on Terror.

— LouJo 🇬🇧 (@LouJoSays) August 29, 2021

https://twitter.com/LouJoSays/status/1432056340101439495

The U.S. has bombed little children to death under alternating Democratic and Republican administrations my entire life. 

It began bombing Afghan children following the unfortunate events of 9/11 in 2001 after a speech by then President George W. Bush proclaimed that "their harbors" would no longer be safe. (Note: Afghanistan is a land-locked country with no harbors.)

The current Democratic administration has announced that it will continue using flying killer robots to bomb Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. (It's also drone bombing Somalia, and plenty of other places, at will.) 

“Enough is enough,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement. “For more than ten years, our government’s drone strikes have killed thousands of innocent people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Muslim world—destroying family homes, wedding parties, and even funeral processions. The civilian casualties in Kabul are simply the latest victims of this misused technology.”

Source: https://scheerpost.com/2021/08/30/demand-for-moratorium-on-drone-warfare-follows-latest-u-s-killing-of-afghan-civilians

Besides the warped views about war sold constantly over corporate airwaves, why is there a steady supply of men and women willing to remotely bomb children in Afghanistan?

Because after young people turned against the military draft for the war on Vietnam, U.S. corporate interests have made damn sure that the poverty draft continues blowing a steady gale force.

With no money for college and no money for dental care and no money for rent, food, and car expenses many young people in the U.S. feel they have no choice but to enlist. The poorer the state -- like my home, Maine -- the harder the poverty draft blows.

But some folks prospered during the 20 year war that's still not over.

(Feel like finding out how much war profiteers donated to the campaign coffers of your elected officials that refuse to actually end the war on terror? You can look it up here on OpenSecrets.org).

Crushed Bodies Are The Foundation For U.S. Exceptionalism, #Racism

Frank Zappa famously called politics "the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex." And I'll admit there's an element of entertainment in the chilling performance of star-spangled children dancing and spouting exceptionalist invective at rallies for the demagogue with the bad hair. The lyrics go like this:

Cowardice

Are you serious?

Apologies for freedom, I can’t handle this.

When freedom rings, answer the call!

On your feet, stand up tall!

Freedom's on our shoulders, USA!

Enemies of freedom face the music, c'mon boys, take them down

President Donald Trump knows how to make America great

Deal from strength or get crushed every time

Far from representing a splinter group at this point in history, the demagogue has been elevated by corporate media platforms like Time Magazine to front-runner for the Republican nomination for president.

"Deal from strength or get crushed every time" is ironically well-illustrated by the crushing of Black bodies into for-profit prisons and police custody where they die regularly. I'm reading Ta-Nehsi Coates' long, meditative letter to his teenage son about fear and the impossibility of any meaningful safety for a young Black man in the USA. Between the World and Me explains what Howard University meant to Coates and his extended family as a life-sustaining "Mecca" of inquiry, wisdom and deep love. What are the chances that his Black son will also be able to beat the odds in a country that builds far more prisons than it builds universities? 

The military-industrial complex needs an entertainment division because what they do in the way of business as usual is even more chilling than celebrating racist slogans: they kill people. Lots of people. 

A telling victim was Prince Jones, a classmate of Coates', top scholar and future leader who was stalked and killed by Maryland police in a case of mistaken identity. Or was it? Coates argues convincingly that the Dream of white supremacy and exceptionalism celebrated in campaigns this season is built on the crushed bodies of the human beings relegated to the bottom of the pile.

And this leads me to the refugees pouring out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Or dying in the rubble thereof.

The Washington DC think tank Council on Foreign Relations published a study of how many bombs my country dropped on the mostly Muslim, mostly brown-skinned people of the oil-rich countries in western Asia last year:

Source: Council on Foreign Relations. Estimate based upon Combined Forces Air Component Commander 2010-2015 Airpower Statistics; Information requested from CJTF-Operation Inherent Resolve Public Affairs Office, January 7, 2016; New America Foundation (NAF); Long War Journal (LWJ); The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ).

The people of the U.S. tolerated this level of bombing civilians and even, in many cases, celebrated it. Because they've been led to believe that killing "them" over there means not having to kill "them" over here. Islamophobic ranting by demagogues suggests that Muslims are a threat to "our" security, and the corporate media reinforce this message 24/7. 

Meanwhile, law enforcement and the judicial system handle the killing over here of those perceived as a threat merely by virtue of their skin color. Upstanding scholars and devoted Christians like Prince Jones look the same as hardened, violent criminals in this context: if they're Black, it's imperative to preserve the power structure that they be held back. 

The U.S. elected its first Black president seven years ago, yet racially-motivated violence has shown no signs of slowing. Like the alleged socialist running for the Democratic nomination this time around (an oxymoron if there ever was one), Obama promised to address poverty and income inequality yet these problems have also grown worse on his watch. 

A recent essay by Michael Glennon in the Boston Globe offered an explanation of why Barack Obama couldn't stop or even slow the wars he campaigned against, or prevent the start of a couple more. "Vote all you want, the secret government won't change" explains that the military and security[sic] bureaucracies are now far more powerful than Congress and the executive branch of government combined. I believe these agencies answer primarily to the corporate interests that fund the entertainment division, and they have momentum that appears to be unstoppable. 

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Black leader assassinated by the USA and whose birthday we celebrate on Monday, said in a 1967 speech against the ongoing war on Vietnam, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Amen to that, brother.

School Begins With Talk of ISIS And The #FergusonSyllabus

The regular crew was on the bridge Sunday at noon in Skowhegan, Maine and we had several visitors. This Navy man, who crews on a nuclear submarine, stopped to talk for quite a while about his perceptions of whether the use of depleted uranium is a war crime (he didn't think so) and the toxic chemicals that do permeate every military base he's been on. Also the work of the Navy pursuing "narco-terrorists" outside Columbia, drug lords who employ one-use fiberglass submarines to ship drugs around.

It was a respectful dialogue, and that is one of the things I love about my bridge community.

My friend Fang's sign can only be partially seen here but says in full:
NOBAMA
DEPLETED URANIUM
IS A
WAR CRIME

By carrying this sign, he is creating a space for the discussion to happen. For a long time he had a sign that said D.U. = WAR CRIME but most of his audience didn't know what D.U. stood for and probably just read it as Duh. So maybe stupidity = war crime?

Which bring us to ISIS. Click through to Vimeo to watch this video on the confusing situation where the US first arms militants like ISIS and then subsequently bombs them. Or, if you prefer text to video, you might want to read Edward Snowden's latest revelation, documents showing that Israel's spy agency Mossad trained ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, aided by the CIA and Britain's M-16.


Pentagon Hymn, the shores of Tripoli from MarkFiore on Vimeo.

Our ten year old grandson told us that he loves his new teacher, that she is young, that she told them about ISIS and what bad guys they are, and that she mentioned that in 5th grade they would be studying the Bill of Rights. Then she mentioned that people standing on the bridge every week in a nearby town is an example of the First Amendment. Our grandson raised his hand and told her some of those people were his grandparents.

I worry when I hear that kids are going back to school learning about ISIS, but not Ferguson. (Maybe she'll cover that, too, who knows?) I've seen news reports that some school administrators are telling their teachers "change the subject" if Ferguson comes up. I'm sure many educators will ignore that particular directive.

Others have put forth a hash tag #FergusonSyllabus to help organize material to teach about racism in the USA, police brutality, and let us hope some lively debate on whether racist policing is a standalone problem or part of a larger class war in which people of color are far more likely to be low income than white people are. And how white racism sows confusion.

The more confusing, the better for our corporate masters. How do you explain ISIS to 5th graders -- and still keep your job? Maybe Irony Guard would help.


Today is Labor Day when educators everywhere rest an extra day and write lesson plans. Will they be teaching that organizers called for people to stop driving at 4:30pm today and use emergency blinkers for 4 1/2 minutes in solidarity with the demand that Police Officer Darren Wilson be charged and tried for the death of Michael Brown?

Because Ferguson. Everywhere. Now.

Morgan Bradley (left) asks school girls what they plan to be when they grow up as protesters demonstrated against the police shooting of Michael Brown at the Ferguson police station on Saturday, Aug. 30, 2014. Photo by Robert Cohen, rcohen@post-dispatch.com

From Popular Resistance "Over 1,000 Protest In Ferguson, Call For Highway Shutdown Monday"

"The Only Industrial Policy We Have Is A Pentagon Industrial Policy"

Democrats who represent Maine in the House, Chellie Pingree and gubernatorial candidate Mike Michaud, were on hand to celebrate the launch of a $4 billion weapon of mass destruction, the first Zumwalt-class destroyer, at Bath Iron Works earlier this year. The hypocrisy of supporting military contracts that drain away funds for food, housing, health care and education for Maine's low income families is never addressed by the Democratic Party, which claims to advocate for social programs and human needs.

A standing room only crowd gathered at the Winter Street Church in the shadow of General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works (BIW) shipyard for a public forum on the problem of military contracting impoverishing the many to enrich the few.

Each time an opportunity arises to cut the budget for building weapons systems, elected officials claim that the looming prospect of jobs lost when contracts dry up ties their hands. Or, as panelist Margaret Craven, state senator representing District 16, put it last night: "The only industrial policy this nation has is the Pentagon's industrial policy." 

Organizers for the public forum see the current era of mandatory cuts to all federal program under sequestration as a time ripe for recapturing the billions wasted on building weapons. The last opportunity, the end of the Cold War era, was heralded at the time as the turning point in industry's reliance on Pentagon spending. 

Check out Democratic Senator George Mitchell and President Bill Clinton at a BIW labor Day Rally back on Sep. 5, 1994. 

Clinton is thanked for a federal grant predicted to have BIW producing commercial ships again, and Mitchell touted diversification/conversion (using those very terms) applauding the prediction that BIW would soon turn from only “building warships to commercial production.” 

What happened? As Rep. Chellie Pingree explained to me when I challenged her about conversion of BIW some years back, "You get to Congress and they say 'Do you want to put three thousand people out of work your first term in office?'" 

Why am I picking on Democrats? Because they talk the conversion talk, but do not walk the walk. I think their duplicity is more dangerous than the blatant war mongering of Republicans, because of all the liberals who sit home on their hands when a Democrat is in office.

State Sen. Craven made an excellent point last night when she observed "people seem to pick and choose what jobs they act to protect. We in Maine just turned down 3500 jobs in healthcare. If we as a state turned down 3500 jobs at BIW there would be sparks flying and we would never have heard the end of it. If we had turned down even 100 jobs at BIW we would never have heard the end of it.”

(This is a reference to the Republican governor of Maine turning down federal Medicaid funding for several years running.)

She went on to say, "Cuts to military spending have already drawn screeching from members of Congress...That's what we're told to do if we get to Washington – bring home the dollars. Unless there are people working on peace initiatives there are always going to be members of Congress bringing home the military pork barrel dollars instead."

Much was said on the subject of tax incentive programs that benefit BIW and other corporate entities doing business in the state of Maine -- and every other state in the nation. 

Professor Emeritus Orlando Delogu from USM School of Law, spoke up to say that BIW may be the largest beneficiary of Maine's corporate welfare system 

but it is by no means the only beneficiary of this largesse....Fortune 500 to mid- size corporations have learned that they can whipsaw states against each other where they can get the best deal, the largest bite of a state or local tax rebate that they can negotiate...Wal-mart no more needs the dollars they squeezed out of Lewiston than BIW and General Dynamics need the dollars they squeezed out of  the city of Bath. 

The defense industry plays this game very, very well. Here we are continually regaled that if Maine doesn't pony up the latest tax subsidy to BIW the work will go to another state. What is publicized as a free market economy is really a corporate subsidy economy. We (Maine) give $240 million a year in subsidies to entities that don't need the money.

Panelist Mariam Pemberton of the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) a progressive think tank in Washington DC,  observed that "coming up with a plan to diversify Maine's economy could become a key issue" in upcoming gubernatorial election. 

She presented IPS's three point program of action for conversion.

1. Make the arguments for a shift in budget priorities from the Pentagon into the domestic side of the budget. Pemberton identified problems with the current “defense” drawdown:

It's the shallowest drawdown in history (as a comparison, post Cold War cuts reduced the Pentagon's budget by about 1/3) and also it involves no investment in the civilian side of the budget. This is needed so defense contractors and their workers have somewhere to go and something to do...BIW is going to keep making warships as long as the only industrial policy we have is a Pentagon industrial policy.

2) Work with state legislators to create a commission to come up with plan to diversify Maine's economy. Here she observed  "the unions are absolutely key to getting this done." 

3) Educate legislators on availability of federal money for planning on how to diversify economies.

Pemberton noted efforts in Connecticut and Maryland to plan for conversion, and expressed her view that "this is our best shot since the end of the Cold War for coming up with a peace economy." Her article "Demilitarizing the Economy: A Movement Is Underway" provides details of how the IPS three point plan is being implemented in other locations.

Forum organizer Bruce Gagnon of Midcoast Citizens for Sustainable Economies pointed out that the City of Bath -- where he resides -- made an economic study in 2009 that identified that the city's tax base is overly dependent on BIW and failure to diversify the local economy “could place the City's future prosperity at risk."

Pemberton cited the UMass economics study on the number of jobs generated by a $1 billion investment in various forms of economic activity showing that building weapons is the worst choice among many. (Just giving a tax rebate actually generates more jobs.) She went on to explain why military contracting is a bad job generator -- because relative to other sectors of the economy, even other manufacturing sectors, it is capital intensive and most of the jobs generated are relatively high salary jobs.

Panelist Leslie Manning of Bath, a former union rep and organizer, noted that there is a lot of waste in Pentagon contracting. Her observation that there is a national movement to call for a Pentagon audit drew hearty applause from the audience. 

While listening to the panel I did a bit of research on whether or not Maine's two reps have put their money where their mouth is recently to cut defense spending. Here are the results. 

HR 4870 20-Jun-2014 12:31 PM

Making appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2015, and for other purposes. 

Michaud voted yes, Pingree voted no

Both Maine's reps did vote well on some of HR4870's amendments:

Rejected 165-250 Lee (D-CA) amendment to prohibit the use of funds to be used for the purposes of conducting combat operations in Iraq.
Both Michaud & Pingree voted yes

Rejected 182-231 Lee (D-CA) amendment to prohibit use of funds to be obligated or expended pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.

Both Michaud & Pingree voted yes

Rejected 157-260 Lee (D-CA) amendment to prohibit use of funds to be obligated or expended pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military of Force after December 31, 2014.

Both Michaud & Pingree voted yes

Rejected 153-260 Lee (D-CA), to prohibit use of funds for the purpose of conducting combat operations in Afghanistan after December 31, 2014.

Both Michaud & Pingree voted yes

Wonder why Mike Michaud voted "yes" after years of "no" votes and telling activists that U.S. military spending is out of control -- did I mention that he got the Democratic Party nomination to run for governor?

Ships, Shoes & Submarines: #Maine Jobs and Our Dependence on Military Production

Midcoast Citizens for Sustainable Economies

Announces a VITAL CONNECTIONS Public Forum

“Ships, Shoes, and Submarines: Maine Jobs

and Our Dependence on Military Production”

Friday June 27^th, Winter Street Church in Bath – Free and Open to the Public

BATH – A newly formed citizens’ coalition based in Bath, Midcoast Citizens for Sustainable Economies (MCSE), presents a Vital Connections forum on June 27 for the exchange of information and ideas about the diversification of Maine’s military manufacturing sector.

Experts will review what other states are currently doing to move beyond their dependence on military spending and seed a discussion about the possibilities for Maine. In 2013, the state of Connecticut passed a law creating a statewide planning commission to help the state prepare for conversion from their heavy reliance on military contracts. Additional states are following suit, with Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio and Michigan, among others, working on similar legislation.

As we prepare to have statewide discussions about Maine’s future – and prepare for an important election in November – we invite our fellow Midcoast citizens to enter into a conversation about our spending, our economy and our communities. The expert panel on June 27 includes, so far:

·        Miriam Pemberton, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., who writes and speaks on demilitarization issues for the Institute’s Foreign Policy In Focus project.

·       Leslie Manning of Bath, an advocate for economic and social justice and the Quaker representative to the Maine Council of Churches.  A former union representative and organizer, Leslie served as deputy director of the Bureau of Labor Standards at Maine Department of Labor in a previous administration.

·       Sen. Margaret Craven of Androscoggin County and co-chair of the joint legislative committee on Health and Human Services.  Sen. Craven represents an area where there are many BIW employees and, as a former member of the Appropriations committee, understands the state budget process and our reliance on federal dollars for a variety of programs and services.

·       Moderator Rev. Bill Barter is the Executive Director of the Maine Council of Churches and Senior Pastor at St. Ansgar's Lutheran Church in Portland.  Rev. Barter was born in Bath, lives in Brunswick and has friends and relatives employed in defense industries.

Good paying jobs with decent benefits are essential to Maine's economy and communities, and many of our state’s current jobs are with defense contractors here in Maine.  Almost 10% of our state's GDP is dependent on military contracting, producing everything from destroyers to footwear and apparel, and providing services such as submarine repair and health care contracting. That reliance on continued spending ($3,303.53 per capita, the fourth highest in the country) makes Maine especially vulnerable to expected reductions in Pentagon spending.

Data shows that defense spending is not a reliable jobs creator. In a recent study compiled by the University of Massachusetts, $1 billion in Pentagon spending results in 11,200 jobs, while comparable investment in education results in 26,700 jobs being created.  Other sectors fared better, as well: clean energy results in 16,800 jobs, health care creates 17,200 jobs, and even returning that money to taxpayers could result in 15,100 new jobs. 

References: 

http://fcnl.org/pdfs/issues/budget/Jobs_vs_Military_Final.pdf  

http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/published_study/PERI_military_spending_2011.pdf    

We invite the public to take part in the potluck from 5:30 to 6:30 just before the event. The Winter Street Church is located at 880 Washington in Bath, across from the Patten Free Library. Admission is free, though donations will be gladly accepted to cover costs.

The new citizens’ group MCSE is pleased to produce their first official event under the auspices of Vital Connections, a public forum that meets quarterly in the Midcoast area. Vital Connections’ participants involved in local self-reliance projects around the Bath/Brunswick/Freeport region of Maine present their work and vision to the public and to one another.

Vital Connections forums foster knowledge and awareness of what it takes for our community, and the region as a whole, to reach relative self-sufficiency in basic areas. The forums urge action to follow from the sharing of knowledge and awareness. The basic areas include food, energy, health, education, the arts, local investment and funding, social justice, criminal justice, local government democracy, security and peace.

For more information on MCSE and the June 27^th forum, contact Carol Huntington at 443-5777, or find “Ships, Shoes and Submarines” on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/BathDiversificationForum                 

For info on Vital Connections, contact Rosalie Paul at gaia@gwi.net, or 207-406-2273; or John Rensenbrink at john@rensenbrink.com, 207-725-6955.