The Greek Tragedy

by Peter Deccy

Much has been reported about the decline of the Greek economy. Some Republicans have enjoyed using the tragedy to warn the same fate awaits the US unless it cuts its social spending, often implying the social safety net in Greece supports a lazy society that prefers drinking on the beach and handouts to hard work and productivity.

Nice try. What’s been missing in mainstream media coverage is the fact that Greece is the 3rd largest importer of weapons in the world. That’s right, China, India, Greece.

Greece is largest importer of weapons among the NATO allies. While NATO countries spend an average of 1.7% of their GDP on ‘defense’, Greece has been spending 4%. That’s roughly $1,500 per person.
It has a standing army of 156,000 men, more than the UK which has 6 times the population of Greece. Military service of nine months is compulsory.

And who is selling them the weapons? No, it’s not the world largest weapons trafficker (the US) this time. It’s France and Germany, the belt tighteners who have been pressing Greece to accept a bread and water diet to solve their financial crisis.

Of course, you need a threat of cosmic proportions to justify runaway military spending. For Greece, that’s Turkey. But wait, isn’t Turkey Greece’s NATO ally? Yes, they are, but don’t look behind the curtain. The extreme right in Greece has long used the dispute over Cyprus to justify their militarism. That sounds vaguely familiar.

So the Republican’s have it half right, which is twice their average score. If we don’t watch out we’ll end up in the same mess Greece is in. But it won’t be because we’re taking too good care of our people. It will be because of our addiction to militarism.

New York Times LTE re NATO and the pro-peace majority

Generally speaking the pro-peace events in Chicago surrounding the NATO war summit have been very good, and we’ve been getting superb media coverage. Photos, reports etc to come soon.  Here’s my letter to the editor in yesterday’s New York Times (I believe it was only online, not in the “hard copy” of the paper).

To the Editor:

While you paint a fair portrait of the NATO summit meeting in Chicago this weekend, you miss a key point. The “protesters” descending on the city represent the solid pro-peace constituency in the country. Every recent poll shows a large bipartisan majority supporting a rapid end to the American-NATO war in Afghanistan, and a recent University of Maryland poll showed overwhelming support for big cuts in military spending.

The focus on security for the visiting heads of state at the summit meeting are legitimate, and the resulting inconveniences to city residents inevitable. Conjectures about possible violence by demonstrators, however, are overblown.

Our first concern must be the real, not speculative, violence facing the people of Afghanistan in this war. According to the United Nations, last year was the worst year for civilian deaths in Afghanistan, with more than 3,000 killed.

As a former Chicagoan, back in town for various pro-peace NATO events, I agree with Garry McCarthy, the police superintendent, that the city can handle large demonstrations and that the next few days will be “exciting,” as democracy should be.

KEVIN MARTIN
Executive Director, Peace Action
Chicago, May 17, 2012

Peace Action and NATO are in Chicago

 

By Judith Le Blanc

Peace Action and 38 groups and over 200 activists are meeting in Chicago at the Counter-Summit for Peace and Economic Justice while NATO meets to prepare for more war.

And the whole town is talking about NATO and those who believe it is time to retire that outdated military alliance. Read Chicago Area Peace Action’s opinion piece in the May 16 Chicago Tribune.

Yes, we are one of the voices  included in the mainstream media. Why? Because we are voicing the majority opinion: the US-NATO war in Afghanistan needs to end because the costs are too much to bear.

The people of the US and every NATO country are bearing the costs of this outdated military alliance. It’s time to retire NATO and form a new alliance to address unemployment, hunger and climate change.

NATO summit will be in the national news for the next 5 days. If you are not in Chicago, you can still be a part of the public education on why and how we can have a future without NATO and its wars.

With your help, we are launching a 5 day drive to write letters to the editor to take the message of the true costs of the war in Afghanistan and military spending into as many newspapers and online publications as possible.

Below is a sample letter to the editor.

Use the Frequently Asked Questions for facts you can use.

Read some of the media coverage of the Counter-Summit.

You can watch the live stream of the Counter-Summit plenary sessions on line, starting Friday and Saturday, May 18-19. Check the Network for a NATO Free Future for the Live Stream and times. 

SAMPLE LETTER to the EDITOR

Dear Editor,

As the NATO Summit in Chicago draws near, President Barack Obama should take a good look at what poll after recent poll has stated clearly: Public opinion in this country wants United States and NATO troops home from Afghanistan, sooner rather than later.

With our country still trying to dig out of the economic crisis and local services being cut, most people feel that we need to stop spending money on war and fund [INSERT SERVICES THAT ARE BEING CUT IN YOUR COMMUNITY] instead.

The trillions being spent on war would go a long way to restore [INSERT SERVICES BEING CUT].  In [INSERT YOUR CITY, STATE OR COUNTY] alone, tax payers will [GO TO http://nationalpriorities.org/en/interactive-data/trade-offs/ AND RESEARCH HOW MUCH YOUR COUNTY HAS SPENT ON THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN]

NATO should be retired, not re-purposed. Its Cold War-era ration­ale has ended, and we shouldn’t continue to funnel human and economic resources toward a military alliance that has outlived its purpose.

President Obama, the pro-peace majority in this county wants to take a different path.

Food not Wars

Pentagon (Photo credit: gregwest98)

Dear Friends

The House has voted to cut $36 billion from nutrition assistance programs, which would kick 2 million people off of food aid, cut benefits for 44 million more, and drop 280,000 low-income children from the free school lunch program.  All part of an effort to increase the over  50% of discretionary spending going into the Pentagon’s coffers.

This week, as early as Wednesday afternoon, your Member of Congress will be voting on amendments on ending the Afghanistan War and on a number of Pentagon weapons systems we don’t need.

Our movement for peace and justice must flood the Congress with calls to change federal spending priorities from wars and weapons to fund our communities and feed the hungry.

Please take a moment now and call your Representative at 202-224-3121 and ask them to vote for amendments that end the Afghanistan War and that cut Pentagon spending.

While some Republicans want to slash programs like Food Stamps, Meals on Wheels for the elderly, child care and child abuse prevention, they have added $10 billion for nuclear weapons and propose language in the National Defense Authorization Act that might bring us closer to war with Iran.  Fortunately, our allies on Capitol Hill will be offering amendments this week to end the Afghanistan war more quickly, to prevent war with Iran and to cut the Pentagon budget.

Call your Representative now at 202-224-3121 and ask them to vote for amendments make our communities a priority, not more war and nuclear weapons.

Your Representative will be voting on these important issues starting on Wednesday and finishing Friday afternoon.  Please forward this email to your friends, family and colleagues and ask them to make this quick, important call.

Humbly for Peace,

Kevin Martin
Executive Director
Peace Action

In Chicago for the NATO Free Future Counter-Summit and marching on May 20?

If you are marching on May 20, take our Nonviolence & Media training at 5pm on Wednesday, May 16.

Feel prepared and supported to exercise your right to nonviolent protest and speak to the media about why we must  end the war in Afghanistan and retire NATO.

After an overview of NATO/G8, the National Lawyers Guild and Street Medics will do presentations and answer questions.

You will have the option to do a NVDA training or break out to a media training session led by trainers from Peace Action and AFSC.

RSVP

You will feel ready to go on Sunday, know your rights and counter the NATO summit media spin! Space is limited, please email Mary at mzerkel@afsc.org if you are interested in participating.

March on May 20 with the Network for NATO Free Future contingent for  the IVAW and CANG8 march.

A few Peace Action media hits around the Obama visit to Afghanistan and Bin Laden anniversary

Peace Action West’s Political Director Rebecca Griffin’s excellent op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle focused on public opinion and opportunities to end the war while stressing diplomacy, political and economic development support for Afghanistan.

Field Director Judith Le Blanc’s response to the president’s speech from Kabul addressed the cost of the war to both the Afghan and U.S. people (watch for this piece, it could show up in your local paper, as it is being distributed nationally by the Oregon Peace Institute’s op-ed service, and it was also published with a different headline on Counterpunch).

Executive Director Kevin Martin and U.S. Labor Against the War’s Michael Eisenscher called for the troops to come home now, not at the end of 2014 or worse, 2024, in an essay on Common Dreams.

Martin again, on Chicago public radio station WBEZ’s excellent Worldview program yesterday, spoke of the president’s trip in the context of the public’s clear support for ending the war rapidly, upcoming congressional action on Afghanistan, and the NATO Summit in Chicago later this month (my segment is from yesterday, 5.2.12, and begins 16 minutes into the program, lasts about 22 minutes, with two good callers!)

Musings on the President’s “Twelve More Years!” Speech from Afghanistan

–Executive Director Kevin Martin

(Field Director Judith Le Blanc will also post her observations)

The president spoke of the strength of the Afghan security forces. Yet he had to make this surprise trip to Kabul under cover of darkness because of security fears. Doesn’t this speak volumes as to how little we’ve accomplished after eleven years (our country’s longest war).

Three hundred seventy eight U.S. troops have died since Obama’s killing. For what? And the UN reported 2011 as the worst year for Afghan civilian deaths with 3,021 people killed. Again, this is the level of “security” we’ve attained after eleven years of war?

The best way this “stay until 2024 plan” can be described is “Quagmire Light.” Surely the president and the military establishment recognize the U.S. public won’t stand for another 12 years of full-scale war, so this seems to be there stab at calibrating the most they can get away with in terms of an enduring presence in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is ranked the third most corrupt nation on the planet after North Korea and Somalia by Transparency International. That would have been very inconvenient for the president to acknowledge, but does that sorry fact justify staying another dozen years?

What agreement? It has not been made public. This is the allegedly (or at least the self-proclaimed) most transparent administration in U.S. history. What are they afraid of? And why does President Karzai think he needs to get approval from his Parliament but President Obama evidently does not? Is this not in reality a treaty, requiring the advice and consent (usually called “ratification”) of the U.S. Senate (the very body the president and vice president served in until very recently)?

The president tried to paint this as the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of the war, but there’s no peace treaty, which is the way wars usually end, yes?

Instead of this agreement, and follow-up plans to be hashed out at the NATO Summit in Chicago in three weeks, the president should be announcing the withdrawal of all U.S. military forces as soon as possible, and a massive reinvestment of our tax dollars now wasted on war and militarism repurposed to job creation and human and environmental needs spending. This would be a political winner for him, as his base and swing voters solidly support a swift end to the war, and even Romney voters, by a slim majority, favor this as well.

John King on CNN noted 2024 is six presidential terms since the 9-11-01 attack. Think about that for a minute – six presidential terms. Anderson Cooper noted that the Taliban doesn’t need any training, why does it cost us so much to train Afghan forces? Journalism!

Corporate War Profiteer Socialism – Lockheed Martin Throws Its Weight Around (Again)

Here’s a terrific article written by Peace Action national board co-chair and Montgomery County, Maryland Peace Action coordinator Jean Athey on the unmitigated chutzpah of the world’s biggest war profiteer, Lockheed Martin, published by our friends at Foreign Policy in Focus.

http://www.fpif.org/articles/lockheed_throws_its_weight_around_again

In Montgomery County, Maryland — just outside of Washington, DC — the county executive recently proposed, as a part of his annual budget, a no-strings-attached grant of $900,000 to Lockheed Martin, the largest military contractor in the world. Citizens of the county objected to the handout in public hearings that the county council held on the budget.

One member of the council, after hearing citizen testimony, commented that the county could probably find better ways of spending $900,000. This was the only public comment any member of the council made on the issue.

Yet The Washington Post immediately criticized the county council in a vitriolic editorial in which it accused the council of engaging in “demagoguery masquerading as social justice.”

Lockheed Bites Back

Lockheed Martin and its friends at The Washington Post are still outraged that in 2010 the Council refused to pass a special law to give Lockheed Martin a unique tax advantage that would have cost the county $450,000 per year — at a time when the county was faced with draconian cuts to critical services. The county executive, at the behest of Lockheed Martin, had asked the council to change the legal definition of a hotel, specifically to exempt the patrons of Lockheed Martin’s new luxury hotel in Bethesda, MD from paying the county’s 7-percent hotel tax. The proposed law would have applied to no other facility in the county.

After hearing from citizens on this outrageous bill, the council tabled it and never voted on it, effectively killing it. As a result, patrons of the hotel, called the Center for Leadership Excellence (CLE), must pay the lodging tax, just like the patrons of every other hotel in the county. The Washington Post and Lockheed Martin consider this situation grossly unfair. The proposed grant is designed to recompense Lockheed Martin for two years worth of the tax.

Let’s put this tax exemption proposal in perspective by taking a quick look at Lockheed Martin’s finances. In 2010 the company took home $3.9 billion in profits from the portion of its business that is paid directly by taxpayers (84 percent). Lockheed Martin’s CEO, Robert Stevens, received $21.9 million in compensation in 2011.  So this company is doing quite well for itself, thanks to the taxpayers, and our largesse will continue into the future. One example: It is now estimated that the F-35, a Lockheed Martin product, will end up costing taxpayers a total of $1.5 trillion dollars. If you laid out $1.5 trillion end-to-end in $100 bills, you could circle the Earth at the equator 59 times.

Despite the extraordinary wealth of this company, The Washington Post believes that council members are being “craven” in requiring the CLE to remain subject to the county’s hotel tax, given that only Lockheed Martin’s personal invitees can stay at the CLE — that is, members of the public can’t make a reservation there. Let’s consider this argument a bit more closely.

When Lockheed Martin’s own employees stay at the CLE, according to the Post, the corporation passes on the costs of the hotel tax to the appropriate federal contract. In other words, Lockheed Martin is already compensated by the federal government for any lodging costs the company incurs, and given federal procurement regulations, the company can charge indirect costs on top of the local taxes it pays. This means that Lockheed Martin gets its money back, with interest, on its employee lodging costs.

Even if Lockheed Martin didn’t get that money back, it would still make no sense to exempt this extremely wealthy company from paying a tax on employee lodging costs. The company also invites contractors and vendors to stay at the hotel. Why should these people not be required to pay a tax that they would pay if they instead chose to stay at the Marriott?

In reality, Lockheed Martin rents rooms to more than its employees, contractors and vendors. It uses its world-class conference center for . . . conferences. For example, the law school of the University of Southern California will hold a conference at the hotel in October. A registration form, available online until recently, asked conference participants to indicate whether they intended to stay at the CLE and pay a nightly rate of $225 during the conference or whether they would find their own accommodations. Since Lockheed Martin claims that the hotel is used almost solely for its employees—the bizarre rationale for the proposed tax exemption—this conference looks a bit suspicious. After citizens presented a copy of the conference registration form to the Montgomery county council during the public hearings on the budget, documenting that Lockheed Martin’s definition of “employee” is quite expansive, the form was removed from the website.

It is extraordinary that the company would make an issue of this tax. Although the amount of money—$450,000 per year—is significant to Montgomery County, it is essentially a rounding error for Lockheed Martin.

There’s more: not only are Lockheed Martin and The Washington Post furious at the county council for questioning the wisdom of a special million-dollar gift to Lockheed Martin to compensate it for having to pay the tax. They are also still irate that in 2011 the council briefly considered a non-binding resolution asking Congress to support the needs of local communities and cut military spending. Lockheed Martin suddenly had a job for a few of its 91 lobbyists: kill the resolution, which they did. Within a few days of Lockheed Martin bullying the council, a couple of council members were “persuaded” that the resolution was a bad idea. Since the resolution no longer had majority support, it was not brought up for a vote.

The Politics of Jobs

In its recent editorial, the Post once again castigated the council for having had the gall to briefly consider a resolution that never even came up for a vote. “Last fall,” the Post editorialized, “council members flirted witha resolution urging Congress to spend less on national defense. They backed down once it dawned that defense contractors such as Lockheed are among Montgomery’s biggest employers. In effect, council members were advocating layoffs for their own constituents.”

Contrary to The Washington Post’s assertion, the council did not decline to pass the resolution because it suddenly dawned on them that Lockheed Martin employs about 7,200 people in the county. Council members backed down under extreme political pressure, brought to bear on them from Lockheed Martin. In fact, the county is home to NIH, FDA, and other large federal agencies that employ far more people in the county than does Lockheed Martin. Without a reprioritization of federal spending, many people working in these agencies are quite likely to lose their jobs.

Even worse, the Post’s argument implies that the availability of local jobs supported by federal military contractors should deprive citizens of the ability to advocate a change in foreign policy and a say in the allocation of federal resources. Large military contractors, in fact, have distributed their subcontractors and their factories throughout the country in a politically astute manner. Economist and former Pentagon official Alain C. Enthoven once observed, “The ideal weapons system is built in 435 congressional districts and it doesn’t matter whether it works or not.” In the 2009 fight by a coalition of advocacy groups to kill the F-22, a plane made by Lockheed Martin that no one in the Pentagon wanted—from Rumsfeld to Panetta—Lockheed Martin placed several full-page ads in The Washington Post that consisted solely of a list of every congressional district in the country, alongside Lockheed Martin’s estimate of how many jobs would be lost in each district if the F-22 was cancelled. So much for subtlety. The plane doesn’t work, it’s extremely expensive, and we don’t need it for our “security,” but note to Mr. or Ms. Congressperson: fund this plane or we’ll see that jobs will be lost in your district—one of which will be yours.

The Washington Post and Lockheed Martin are working in lock-step to intimidate anyone who questions the idea of a reallocation of federal resources away from the current excessive level of military spending. Moreover, they are also using their extraordinary power to coerce a local council to do their bidding in a blatant corporate welfare scam.

Appeal to the Youth of the World from Nobel Peace Laureates Summit in Chicago

A smart and inspiring appeal from the Nobel Peace Laureates Summit in Chicago, which our National Field Director Judith Le Blanc is attending on behalf of Peace Action and International Peace Bureau, which won the Peace Prize in 1910 (Peace Action is a long-time member of IPB, and we were honored to be asked to send a representative to the Summit by IPB).

The Appeal quotes one of my favorite sayings by Martin Luther King, Jr., a Nobel Peace Laureate, “those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war,” still so true today.

The appeal is attached here as a pdf

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Moving to a Culture of Peace

New Jersey Peace Action Executive Director Madelyn Hoffman had a terrific op-ed in the Bloomfield Life last week, titled Moving to a Culture of Peace linking local gun violence, military spending and how it is robbing our communities of needed investments in human needs, at the federal, state and local levels, and the endless war in Afghanistan. Madelyn cites recent polls showing public support for that war at an all-time low, yet the Obama Administration announced over the weekend an agreement to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan until at least 2024 (more on that agreement, and what we can do to prevent its implementation, will be coming soon).

And speaking of a culture of peace, our National Field Director, Judith Le Blanc, is currently in Chicago representing Peace Action at an international conference of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates (no, Judith didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize – not that she isn’t deserving! – she was invited to attend as Peace Action is the largest U.S. member of the International Peace Bureau, which won the peace prize in 1910, yes, over a hundred years ago!). IPB was also the coordinator for the Global Day of Action on Military Spending, which many Peace Action affiliates around the country participated in last week with Tax Day actions.

Watch this space soon for posts from Judith from Chicago. In the meantime, the Chicago Tribune had an interesting story yesterday about the Nobel Peace Laureates conference, it’s worth a read.