It was 15 years ago today when the U.S. invaded Iraq on the false pretense that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. The attack came despite worldwide protest and a lack of authorization from the United Nations Security Council. At around 5:30 a.m. in Baghdad on March 20, 2003, air raid sirens were heard as the U.S. invasion began.
http://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/20/a_criminal_war_15_years_after
Truth in Recruitment Monthly Meetings
http://truthinrecruitment.org/
Find out about monthly meetings in Santa Barbara, CA
Hear reports from our volunteers about activities at Santa Barbara and Santa
Maria High schools.
Strategize on next steps to enforce the local recruiter policy, meetings with
high school principals, organizing with parents in Santa Maria, and
updates on the Opt Out form.
Truth in Recruitment is a non-profit, student advocacy group based in Santa Barbara, California. We are students, families, veterans, youth groups, teachers, social justice activists and members of faith communities. Our goal is to help students ask the right questions about the stakes of a military career, provide non-military options for academic and professional success, inform parents of their privacy rights, and to implement school policies regulating recruiter presence on campuses.
If you are a student or family member, please take a look at our page Life After High School for information on ways to make a difference in your community and set yourself up for an enriching career. Also, take a look at our many resources to learn about your family’s privacy rights, and how to opt out of having your child’s information released to recruiters.
You can join our movement by sharing our message and resources with your community, volunteering for community service, joining our mailing list, or making a tax-deductible donation here.
Schools are for the education of students!
Watch this video before you enlist: http://truthinrecruitment.org/2016/12/13/watch-before-you-enlist/
AFRICOM and the Invasion of Africa
This past weekend was epic.
Several BAP members attended the Conference Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases, bringing a Black internationalist perspective that has long been absent in the anti-war movement.
You can watch a conference plenary on AFRICOM and the invasion of Africa featuring three BAP members—Maurice Carney, Netfa Freeman and Margaret
Kimberley—and National Organizer Ajamu Baraka. In fact, Maurice Carney’s talk on the Democratic Republic of Congo came at a good time: Yesterday marked the 57th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the DRC.
Other BAP members such as Nellie Bailey,Mekdes Ferguson,Asantewaa Mawusi Nkrumah-Ture and Efia Nwangaza offered insights from the audience that shed light on the antiquated mentality still present in this space. The conference marked a significant departure point for building the anti-war, anti-imperialist movement and makes clear the importance of focusing on Africa, especially as the Trump
administration expands the work of the U.S. empire in exploiting the continent of our ancestors. It is our responsibility—being in the center of this empire—to do the work of decolonizing movement spaces and stop the U.S. war machine.
We Oppose VA Healthcare Privatization Petition
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/we-oppose-va-healthcare-privatization
VA PRIVATIZATION IS HERE WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!
I assume you all know the VA healthcare system is being massively privatized. Today 40% or more of all vets going to the VA for outpatient care are now funneled into the Choice and Community Options programs (per VA records). We do not know how well those vets like private care. We do know that the VA
was to report to the Congress and public last summer after they surveyed vets on that issue. They knew this had to be done for 3 years. VA management refused to
conduct the survey and now they tell us it will be done in mid or late 2018 before the survey is completed and reported out.
By that time, possibly, 45% of all outpatient vets may have been pushed into the private sector.
This is the same trick Mr. Bush and the boys used on Medicare in 2004. If you are an old guy like me, you know about the Medicare Advantage (MA) program. This is
privatization of traditional single payer Medicare. They plopped the insurance companies between you and your healthcare. MA costs the feds about 20% MORE than traditional Medicare. Because of this additional 20% cost which is tens of billions per year, the Medicare Trust Fund will run short of money faster and then the Republicans will call for canning the whole Medicare system.
With the Choice program which costs about 30% more than VA provided care in VA facilities, they want to run the VA out of money and then close down the VA completely and contract out all VA now done by civil service staff plus bust the
unions.
Vets who use VA hospitals and clinics for their care are satisfied with their care, want to continue to go to the VA and want the VA fixed and funded.
YOU NEED TO TAKE ACTION!
PETITION: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/we-oppose-va-healthcare-privatization
The VFP Working Group Stop VA Privatization, Fix, Fund & Fully Staff the VA was formed about 8 months ago to STOP THE PRIVATIZATION. http://www.veteransforpeace.org/take-action/stop-privatization-veterans-health-administration/
There are 13 or so Save Our VA Action Teams forming across the US. YOU need to form one in your community. YOU can start this by clicking on this survey link to read about Action Teams and sign up. http://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MTF76TP
The United Nations has asked its member states to observe an Olympic truce
http://worldbeyondwar.org/north-korea-south-korea-threatening-seek-peace/
The United Nations has asked its member states to observe an Olympic truce during the upcoming February 9-25 Winter Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, and for one week on either side. That would be February 2 to March 4.
South Korea has asked the United States to delay its war rehearsal flights over South Korea until after the truce.
Please sign a petition that can be printed out and delivered to every nation on earth, urging their abstention
from war and from provocative war “exercises” during this period, and urging them to continue the truce
indefinitely thereafter.
SIGN http://worldbeyondwar.org/peace-treaty-north-korea-can-sign/
More information: http://worldbeyondwar.org/north-korea-south-korea-threatening-seek-peace/
Military Causing Noise Pollution from Okinawa to Vermont
VFP Board of Directors member Adrienne Kinne speaking outside Kadena Air Base in Okinawa. The local community has been demanding the closure of Kadena Air Base, an airfield that constantly disrupts daily life on the island. Military aircraft are conducting missions all throughout the day and night. Also, the U.S. Air Force wants to base the F-35 fighter jets our of Vermont and a huge movement is building in opposition of that decision. Learn more about the Vermont Issue here: http://www.stopthef35.com/
It’s Your Duty to Disobey Unlawful Orders
National VFP board member Monisha Rios is speaking to U.S. Marines at Futenma Air Station.
Filmed in December 2017 during a Veterans For Peace delegation to Okinawa.
Learn more: http://thepeacereport.com/vfpinokinawa/
Support The Peace Report on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/thepeacereport
Donate through Paypal: http://www.paypal.me/thepeacereport
@peacereportnow
Website: http://thepeacereport.com
http://www.twitter.com/peacereportnow
http://www.facebook.com/peacereportnow
For Decades Okinawa Suffers From Helicopter Crashes
Filmed in December 2017 during a Veterans For Peace delegation to Okinawa. VFP member Ken Mayers is speaking at Futenma Air Station, aka the world’s most dangerous air field.
Learn more: http://thepeacereport.com/vfpinokinawa/
Support The Peace Report on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/thepeacereport
Donate through Paypal: http://www.paypal.me/thepeacereport
@peacereportnow
Website: http://thepeacereport.com
http://www.twitter.com/peacereportnow
http://www.facebook.com/peacereportnow
Will YOU Volunteer to Help Stop VA Privatization?
As you know the Congress, VA, VA contractors and the White House are pushing as many veterans into private sector healthcare via the Community Care and Choice programs. Both administratively and legislatively these privatizers have been very successful. They are very smart, the effort is well funded and the privatizers get help from many quarters including the corporate owned media.
Presently a high percentage of veterans asking for outpatient doctor appointments are being sent to the private sector for care. The email you received from me yesterday including Suzanne Gordon’s article provide more information.
If you are interested in learning more about VA privatization, please study the documents at this
website: http://ffvhc.org/
This is the Fighting for Veterans Healthcare non-profit group that has been organized by a group of individuals who are very concerned with the effort by the Koch brothers and many others to eliminate VA healthcare and move all care into the private healthcare sector. This is the only organization that is keeping up with, writing about and trying to stop the VA privatization. This is the website to go to to keep up to date. Privatization bills are flying around Congress like waste paper from a high speed garbage truck.
Veteran service organizations like the VFW, DAV, Am. Legion, etc. are becoming stronger and stronger advocates for fightingback against VA privatization but being non-profits chartered by the Congress they have to be very careful in how they fight.
Unions, except for the Am. Fed. of Government Employees (AFGE), have not really started to fightback at their state and local union levels. AFGE which represents 700,000 federal workers and about 220,000 of those who are Veterans Affairs Department workers, is the only federal union that has an organized fightback effort at the local level. Rather I should say they are in the middle of implementing a local fightback effort. And they lobby hard in Congress to stop those garbage VA privatization bills flying around the halls of Congress.
REQUEST:
Below is a laundry list of actions that need to be taken to help us stop VA privatization and instead improve
the VA’s ability to meet present and future veterans’ medical needs.
1.
Letters to the editors of newspaper, op eds to newspapers
2.
Press conferences by VFP members and members of any
other veterans groups, unions or peace groups, issuing press
alerts before the press conference and press releases with
pictures after the press conference, publicity/invitations
to attend/rally before the press conference, etc.
3.
Group meetings with local US House members or
staffers and meeting with US Senate members or staffers, how
to organize a little rally before the meeting in front of
the congress members office, with Save Our VA banner and
flyers, etc. (we have a letter and over 1,400 person signed
petition on Stopping VA Pvt. that you can give to your
Congressional members or staffers and have a group picture
taken turning in the petition, etc.)
4.
Group meetings with local newspaper, TV and radio
editorial boards, editors, news managers or
reporters
5. Appearances or
interviews on local radio talk shows or TV talk
shows
6. Rallies or
events on Stop VA Privatization or speak at other groups
rallies or events with Save Our VA banners and flyers to
distribute, etc.
7. Coordinate
efforts with local VA hospital Am. Fed. of Government
Employees (AFGE) local union (you can call your local VA
switchboard and ask for the AFGE office and ask to talk to
the president, ask what actions they are taking, urge
president to ask union to co-sponsor a press conference or
rally, etc.)
8. Distribute
Stop VA Privatization flyers in local communities at events,
on busy streets
(we have examples of flyers you can take, run
off and then distribute or take and modify into your own
flyers, a background flyer on privatization by FFVHC is
attached and we have others that are ¼ or ½
half page flyers ready to use)
Fly the Save Our VA banner at such events/actions
9. Display the Save Our VA banner on busy street corners, at events and at
above events. Below is a group of Nashville VFP members at a Nov. 11th parade
carrying the banner.
TO GET A BANNER MAILED TO YOUR HOME:
Send an email to Buzz Davis at dbuzzdavis@aol.com
with your contact info. including Chapter, community and state and how you think you can use the banner. FFVHC put up the money for about 27
banners and we have about 10 or more left to distribute. The banners are free.
10. Tell your story on how you use VA healthcare and how you are against Privatizing the VA on a VFP weekly radio show in Nashville, TN organized and led by Harvey Bennett bennethe2@gmail.com and Jim Wohlgemuth, jrwohlgemuth@juno.com
of the local VFP Chap. (a few of us have already been guests on this show and they are looking for other guests)
11. Join the VFP
Work Gr. To Stop VA Privatization to help plan and manage all the above type of activities.
Contact Buzz Davis to join dbuzzdavis@aol.com
12. And most importantly recruit a few people in your chapter to work on
local activities they choose to do. You cannot be successful alone.
13. Get your chapter to consider and pass a resolution on VA
privatization and healthcare. (we have an example resolution for you to start
with)
For all the above activities we have drafts or examples of what you can do including letters to the
editors and op eds, resolutions, etc.
YOU SHOULD NOT TRY TO REINVENT THE WHEEL.
We ask YOU to volunteer to work and then others will help YOU pull off what you decide YOU want to
do!
TIMING:
We need to take actions, as many as we can,
starting immediately and during the next year before the
Nov. 2018 House and Senate elections.
In this effort no one approves what you want to do,
just decide to do and away you go, and ask us for
help
THE “VA” IS A DIFFICULT & COMPLEX ISSUE.
The VA did not develop is successes and
problems in a day and none of us are going to
“fix” the VA in a week or so of work.
To help win this battle YOU have to turn yourself into a community organizer.
If you are already such an organizer, then please
round up some other volunteers and mentor them on raising
hell in the community.
In this game, in these political times, nice
guys end up being run over by the Koch Brothers’
Bulldozers.
We much fightback hard and smart! We do not have the big bucks. We have the people power if we can
organize it. The people we are
fighting do not and will not respond to rational
arguments. They have received
their marching orders and they will not be deterred by
veterans or community members.
It is their way or the highway!
Dialoguing with elected officials who are
privatization advocates (and who are probably receiving
political contributions as pay offs from the Koch brothers
and their front organizations) are not worth the energy to
sincerely help them change their minds.
It is very unlikely that you will receive any time to
“talk” with them unless they are setting
you up to be a knock down target.
SO YOUR FIRST STEP IS CONTACT US AND TELL US WHAT ACTIONS YOU WANT TO WORK ON. WE CAN GO FORWARD TOGETHER FROM
THAT.
Thank you for reading this and
Peace!
Buzz Davis, member Stop VA Privatization Work
Group.
Please Support Spreading the truth about drones
We hope that you’ll keep supporting Cian Westmoreland’s important work as a drone whistleblower.
Cian is the first recipient of the Drone Whistleblower Fellowship. In the past he was a U.S. Air Force technician who worked on the drone program. Now he takes to heart a statement by Martin Luther King Jr. that remains crucial in 2017: “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”
Speaking clearly about compelling moral issues, Cian offers a blunt perspective on the U.S. drone war: “In this war on terror, we have become terror. Drones are heartless by design, and the act of killing through them can become routine and bureaucratic.”
Cian reports: “I have been connecting, speaking, writing and helping where I can all over Europe.” He has put in a lot of time in Germany, which hosts U.S. military bases directly involved in the drone war.
When Cian speaks out, he is educating activists, journalists, elected officials and the general public. In early winter, for instance, he spoke to 3,000 “hackers and hacktivists” from around the world at the huge Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg. There he addressed “the Global Assassination Grid.”
At the Hamburg conference, “I spoke of the various layers of dehumanizing elements in the drone program to include the structural, political, and psychological. It was not only understood but well received. A professor of mathematics at Cambridge University approached me afterward and said that he’s noticed the problem of students not connecting their work to real life, and that my talk inspired him to go back and show my speech to them.”
It’s far from easy, living out of a suitcase, far from home, doing this kind of work. The pressures are severe, and the resources are thin. Please help Cian Westmoreland keep going with a tax-deductible donation to the Drone Fellowship program.
As one of the very few drone whistleblowers in the world, Cian Westmoreland needs and deserves our support.
More Information: http://act.rootsaction.org/o/6503/t/0/blastContent.jsp?email_blast_KEY=202222
DONATE: http://salsa.wiredforchange.com
Truth in Recruitment
Truth in Recruitment, a project of the Santa Barbara Friends (Quaker) Meeting,
needs your support. We invite you to come to our meetings, volunteer,
spread the word and contribute any dollar amount!
Truth in Recruitment is pleased to have been selected for SB Gives!, a year-end
fundraising program sponsored by The Fund for Santa Barbara and The Santa
Barbara Independent to create a network of donors for nonprofits serving Santa
Barbara County. You can use this link to donate to our campaign: Truth in Recruitment.
Why Our Work Is Needed: In September, while presenting to Santa Maria High School (SMHS) Chicano Studies and World History classes, the teacher showed us an on-campus office manned by a National Guard recruiter. The recruiter runs an anti-bullying program with the acronym W.A.R., We All Rise.
SMHS parents, students and teachers were caught by surprise when he was given an office next to the school’s career center. We have since spoken with the Santa Maria parents and are working with them to address this military presence on campus.
In October, Truth in Recruitment parents, staff, and volunteers met with Santa Barbara Unified School District’s new school board members and the assistant superintendent to address recent violations of the district’s recruiter policy. We told them how recruiters have been following students on social media, collecting student contact information directly from students and recruiting in classes as ‘guest speakers.’ The school board members thanked us for helping them understand the policy and agreed to follow up with us on better implementation.
Your urgently-needed donation can help us continue our work in schools. Please use this link to donate to our
campaign: Truth in Recruitment.
NOTE: Your contribution right now will help us secure additional funds through SB Gives! matching grants.
We thank the many of you who already
support this program. This year, grants from the
McCune Foundation and the Fund
for Santa Barbara have funded two interns and a part time
coordinator, as well
as costs for tabling literature and
travel.
Our work depends on getting the word out – please share this email with your friends and on your
social media pages!
In gratitude,
Kate Connell Coordinator, Truth in Recruitment
truthinrecruitment.org
http://www.facebook.com/TruthinRecruitment/
(805)708-8058