United for Peace and Justice sounds like an organization with whom The Peace Alliance and the DoP Campaign would do well to exchange mutual endorsements. Like me, they believe in a multi-lateral approach that includes both lobbying and demonstrating. The drain on our fiscal resources is always expressed in such big numbers! Let's look at this comparison of what that much money can buy.
| |
Tools for War |
Tools for Peace |
| $14,000 | One cluster bomb | Enroll two children in Headstart |
| $40,000 | One Hellfire missile | Two home health aides for disabled elderly |
| $763,000 | One minute war on Iraq | Annual salary/benefits for 15 RNs |
| $46 million | One hour war on Iraq | Improve, repair, modernize 20 schools |
| $2.1 billion | One Stealth bomber | Annual salary/benefits for 38,000 elementary teachers |
| $12 billion | War in Afghanistan, 2001-2002 | Double federal funding for mass transit |
Do you see why it is that in order to wage peace, the DoP only needs to spend two percent of what the military is currently spending to wage war?
DEMONSTRATION - Sept. 24-26, 2005
- End the War on Iraq!
- Massive Mobilization in Washington, D.C.
- Hold leadership accountable for deaths, destruction, lies, our community losses.
- Three days of action for peace and justice in Washington, D.C.
SCHEDULE
- Saturday, September 24 - March, Rally, Festival
- Sunday, September 25 - Interfaith Service, Grassroots Training
- Monday, September 26 - Lobby Day, Nonviolent Direct Action, Civil Disobedience
BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
- Leave no bases behind.
- End the corporate occupation of Iraq.
- Stop bankrupting our communities.
- Stop military recruitment in our schools.
More than two years after the illegal and immoral U.S. invasion of Iraq, the nightmare continues. More than 1600 U.S. soldiers have died, and at least another 15,000 have been wounded. Even the most conservative estimates of Iraqi deaths number in the tens of thousands. Iraq, a once sovereign nation, now lies in ruins under military and corporate occupation by the U.S. Our promises to rebuild have not been kept, and Iraqis still lack food, water, electricity, and other basic needs.
A majority of Americans believe that this war never should have happened, but our elected representatives in Washington continue to rubber-stamp the administration's disastrous Iraq policies. They have given military recruiters nearly unrestricted access to our schools and the Pentagon nearly unrestricted access to our tax dollars. At a time when our middle class is disappearing and vital social programs are eroding or completely decimated, an overwhelming majority in Congress recently approved the commander-in-chief's request for an additional $82 billion in war funding, and there's already talk of another $50 billion appropriation this fall.
From every corner of this country, people will travel to Washington to bring our demands directly to the policymakers responsible for this unjust war. These three days of actions will send a clear message to the White House and Congress: The Iraq war must end. It's time to bring all the troops home, leaving no U.S. military bases behind, and to stop the corporate theft of Iraq's resources. Instead of draining our national treasury for endless war, we want our tax dollars to be used to repair the damage done to Iraq and to fund services in our communities. We will call for an immediate end to our government's assault on immigrants, the unethical pressures on our young people to join the military, and the undermining of democracy through relentless attacks on everyone's basic rights.
This mobilization will coincide with the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, whose economic policies place corporate profits ahead of basic human needs worldwide. We will speak out against the corporate theft of Iraq's resources and the decimation of the Iraqi economy through privatization and "free trade."
After the third annual conference of The Peace Alliance, many of us are remaining in Washington to see the DoP bill "dropped" on the floor of the House of Representatives. Let's stay a while longer and continue to practice what we've learned. Two weeks after our conference, we will be joined by new allies. Let's present a united front and continue our propeace efforts.
Bring the urgent peacebuilding needs of your community to the attention of your representatives. Express your support for our troops by lobbying for the restoration of benefits to Iraq veterans and accountability for the consequenses they have suffered. They are not being discharged - they are being discarded. In my town, one-third of the homeless are displaced and disenfranchized veterans of this war.
It's got to stop! Every moment, the lives, health, and sanity of fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sweethearts, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters are at risk. We want our families back! We want our country back so that the healing can begin both here and in Iraq.
RSS 2.0
Update - the FBI
I have never been a believer in coincidence. Last night, I was discussing this event with the rest of the propeace community in my state and at The Peace Alliance via email when Lorraine of Grandmothers for Peace sent me an Action Alert on the information below about that same demonstration.
TruthOut had written to Lorraine to draw attention to the fact that the FBI has its eye on United for Peace and Justice, the organizers of the September 24 action. Six pages of internal F.B.I. documents on a group called United for Peace and Justice, which led wide-scale protests over the Iraq war, discuss the group's role in 2003 in preparing protests for the Republican National Convention."
Much more comprehensive dossiers are being studied on other groups known for their progressive stance, notably the ACLU (almost 1200 pages) and Greenpeace (almost 2400 pages). That goes a long way towards explaining why they are ignoring the August 6 action at Oak Ridge, TN. They need more lead time because that's an awfully lot of reading!
Of course, we're getting "It's for your own good" from the FBI, and they deny any intent to violate our First Amendment rights, but we know better than that! To quote Senator DeMint (deliberately out of context) in a recent letter, "...once freedom is tasted, it cannot be denied." The text of the First Amendment is as follows:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
However, please note that the FBI is above the law. Congress hasn't done a thing, and they will continue to very carefully not do a thing! So we really need to make a big deal out of this September 24 action. They are acting like scared cockroaches as they scurry about with their attempts to silence us, and the more numbers we can show, the more impotent they will be rendered.
The TruthOut piece has a link to the NY Times article which added the following: Leslie Cagan, the national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of more than 1,000 antiwar groups, said she was particularly concerned that the F.B.I.'s counter-terrorism division was discussing the coalition's operations. "We always assumed the F.B.I. was monitoring us, but to see the counter-terrorism people looking at us like this is pretty jarring," she said.
I'm quoting all of this to give you the true sense of what is going on, and I leave it to your good judgment to present the information with the proper BALANCE of jubilation at their obvious paranoia, calm confidence in our sheer numbers, and the sensationalism it will take to get media attention. We don't want to scare our closet and armchair activists into not showing up, but we don't want those in the trenches to get the mistaken idea that the situation is already under control. Try to focus on effectiveness. This administration is in for a rocky ride!
"Blue in a Red State"