Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/299330676816503/

 

  Tuesday, April 17th at 6:30 p.m.

  Carpenter Branch Library, 3309 South Grand Avenue

Join Peace Economy Project for their 2nd community forum on Tax Day 2012 which also   happens to be the Global Day of Action against Military Spending, which conic ides with the release of the Stockholm International Peace Research institute’s release of their annual figures on military expenditures.

Panelists Include:
Mike Reid, Executive Director, Veterans for Peace
Colleen Kelly, Instead of War and Palestinian Solidarity Committee

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/188124864639677/

A Global Day of Reckoning
by Sylvester Brown, Jr.

On Tuesday, April 17th, the International Peace Bureau and the Institute for Policy Studies will kick off its second annual “Global Day of Action on Military Spending.” The event seeks to bring public, political, and media attention to the rising costs of military spending and the folly of war. It also aims to stress the dire need to realign our priorities to address the crisis’s impacting our troubled world.

The occasion coincides with the release of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) new annual figures on military expenditures. In 2010 alone, global military spending rose to an all-time high of $1.63 trillion. Organizers of the event are calling for a united focus on “human lives and needs” and new direction in tackling the scourges of poverty, hunger, lack of education, poor health care and environmental issues that threaten the planet.

In America, the Global Day of Action should also be a day when politicians are forced to obey the will of the people. On that day vast constituencies of conscientious Americans ought to send a message to war hungry political candidates and a Congress stubbornly intent on slashing America’s safety nets for the poor and disadvantaged while refusing to trim a military budget gone drastically awry.

According to researchers at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will eventually cost Americans between $3.2 and $4 trillion. That amount—according to several anti-war organizations –is more than enough to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, fully fund a national health care plan, provide free college education to all high school graduates and completely fund a nationwide renewable energy program.

Even though the primary factor that led to the nation’s current deficit dilemma was war spending, bull-headed politicians astonishingly declare they will initiate yet another deadly military adventure in Iran if necessary.

If all other strategies fail, GOP presidential nominee hopefuls Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich said they’d be willing to go to war to keep Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. Ron Paul, who definitely won’t be the GOP nominee, was the only candidate who voiced a common sense retort to war rhetoric: “I’m afraid what’s going on right now is similar to the war propaganda that went on against Iraq,” Paul said.

President Barack Obama also challenged the candidates who expressed a need for the U.S. to harden its position against Iran during the recent American Israel Public Affairs Committee: “When I see the casualness with which those folks talk about war, I am reminded of the costs involved in war,” Obama said. It’s not the candidates “popping off” about war who will make sacrifices, Obama added, “it’s these incredible men and women in uniform and their families who pay the price.”

Not only are political candidates and mostly right-leaning legislators ignoring Paul and Obama, they continue to disregard the wishes of the American people. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released in March, the majority of Americans prefer cutting defense spending to reduce the federal deficit rather than taking money from public retirement and health programs. The polling data indicates that 51 percent of Americans support reducing defense spending and only 28 percent want to cut entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly and poor.

Romney, the candidate most likely to challenge Obama in the 2012 elections, has introduced a plan that’s 60 percent higher than the $525 billion Obama proposed in his FY 2011 defense budget, according to the Cato Institute.

Since the so-called “Super Committee” failed to produce a debt reduction plan, $1.2 trillion in across-the-board defense and non-defense cuts are supposed to kick in automatically. Some Republican lawmakers, like Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) who sat on the super committee, vow to fight military spending cuts. The “off limits” approach is unacceptable, said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) who insists deficit-reduction efforts include more military cuts: “Under an all-of-the-above approach, the Pentagon should not be treated as off limits,” Schumer said. “There is waste in defense just like there is waste in the rest of the discretionary budget.”

The military industrial complex is a powerful force supported by war barons and private-sector monopolies dependent on the production of weaponry and exorbitantly-paid privatized security forces to maintain the messes they create. Politicians have turned a deaf ear to the will of the people and are perfectly content with bartering new jobs and the safety of elderly and impoverished Americans in order to protect and increase an already out-of-control military spending budget.

The Global Day of Action on Military Spending is the appropriate time to refute the “propaganda” Paul mentioned and beat back the callous drumbeat of war and more wars. April 17th should be the day we collectively stir the nation’s consciousness and direct its attention to issues that really matter. It should be a time of reckoning for morally reckless politicians-a rallying cry for massive reaction. The global day of action is the perfect time to bring international attention to the real costs of war and the desperate need to protect our planet and defend humanity.

Sylvester Brown, Jr. is the founder of When We Dream Together, a local nonprofit dedicated to urban revitalization and a board member with the Peace Economy Project (PEP) in St. Louis, Missouri.

The United States has decided for the moment to use drones as its strategic weapon of choice in places that cannot be easily conquered.  This is a poor choice for moral reasons as well as military strategy reasons.

Drones are relatively simple small low flying small aircraft that need no pilot, but are remotely controlled.  They are much like small planes hobbyists fly with hand held controls on large fields.  But drones are not toys but rather are deadly weapons of war.  They once were primarily used and still are used for spying.  They are manipulated by “pilots” at control “joysticks” often many thousands of miles away and can be and are used to kill targeted enemies, sometimes dozens or even hundreds of people.

They have been used to assassinate leaders of “supposed terrorist” armies.  Their advantage is they don’t put the U.S. troops at risk in their deadly missions.  They must rely on sophisticated mapping systems such as are prepared at the Defense Mapping Agency in St. Louis and equipment manufactured at places like our local Boeing factories.

Ann Wright and others have told us of the moral issues involved with drones, but they entail an inherent strategic disadvantage as well.  The United States has been the victor in the nineteenth and twentieth century wars, which were wars of attrition.  The North in the Civil Was was victorious because it had more men, more guns and could replenish disproportionate losses on the battlefields.  In the First World War, the United States and its allies had a greater number of men in the field and greater ability to restore losses of equipment.  In the Second World War the United States and its allies took disproportionate losses in the battlefield, but were better able to train and deploy replacement pilots and aircraft than Germany.  Its supporting ally in that war, the Soviet union lost more men in the field than the Germans, but had more men in place to lose in battle which the Germans could not match.  Likewise even before the nuclear bombing of Japan, the Americans were clearly winning the war of attrition in the Pacific.

Getting back to drones, each one apparently requires one man to each “joystick” to operate each drone to effectively seek out and destroy targets.  Please don’t forget there are more people available to constitute an army of joystick pilots in both India and China.  Although both of those nations presently are not at war with the U.S. they could be in the future.  this is not to mention the large numbers of people, potential joystick pilots, in the Islamic world.

The U.S. would likely lose a drone war of attrition, which to recoup, a U.S. military advantage, would start U.S. military planners to think in nuclear terms or the possibility of using chemical or germ warfare.  This is unthinkable and all reasonable people know that.

Thus, let us encourage our nation to take the moral high ground as well as the most sound military course and stop this drone nonsense, before it’s too late.

Bob Reinhold is an attorney and member of Citizens for Global Solutions.  He also sits on the Instead of War Steering Committee.

Col. Ann Wright, former US Army Colonel, is now a dedicated activist for peace.

Feb. 27th, 7-9 p.m. at Regional Arts Commission, 6128 Delmar Blvd.

Col. Ann Wright is a former US Army Colonel and retired official of the US State Department.  She received the State Department Award for Heroism in 1997, after helping to evacuate several thousand people during the civil war in Sierra Leone.  She is most noted for having been one of three State Department officials to publicly resign in direct protest of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. She wrote a very public letter in opposition when she resigned stating four main points for her resignation.
The decision to invade Iraq without the blessing of the UN Security Council
The “lack of effort” in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process
The “lack of policy” in regard to North Korea
The curtailment of civil liberties within the US

She has since become a dedicated activist for peace, traveling extensively and challenging unjust military policies and oppression throughout the globe.