53 cents of every dollar in taxes goes to military spending. It’s not just the $717 billion that the Pentagon has requested for its regular budget. Watch this great video. (If you’re having trouble running it, turn off the HD.)
Also posted on US Labor Against the War, “Militarism is stealing the future from ordinary Americans,” at http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=24810
Sunday, October 2, 6 pm to 9 pm
Beautiful artwork from local artisans and photographers will be featured in a silent auction.
$10 donation is suggested at the door. All proceeds benefit Under the Hood Cafe & Outreach Center. You can learn more about Under the Hood at www.underthehoodcafe.org.
Join us for a great evening of music, information, and a silent auction.
Bring back the WPA! Bring back the CCC! Fight racism! Tax the rich! Texas Labor Against the War can get with all of this. But also: END THE WARS AND OCCUPATIONS–WE NEED THE MONEY FOR JOBS AND EDUCATION.
(By Gene Lantz, reprinted from Labor Dallas, 08-31-11, http://www.labordallas.org/jobz090211.htm)
America Grapples for Solution to the Jobs Crisis
Help for the jobless must continue, but real solutions are even more important. As North Texas Jobs with Justice prepares for our monthly jobs vigil (11:30 AM Friday, September 2, 525 Griffin at Young in downtown Dallas) we review some of the proposals now floating around.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) wants to bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps. Similar ideas have been put forward by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and by Professor William “Sandy” Darity, whose expertise is public policy, African American studies and economics. Darity’s proposal specifically calls for a new and permanent CCC providing jobs at $20,000/year salary plus $10,000/year benefits.
Kaptur explains her bill in a New York Times editorial where she says that the original CCC was up and running, and providing almost 300,000 new jobs, in three months! She also says, “Every dollar of investment in bricks, mortar, infrastructure and environment returns $1.59 to the economy. This is six times more “bang for the buck” than tax credits and other arcane policy options whose economic impact drain through the economy and yield only 30 cents for every dollar expended.”
Kaptur’s bill is styled HR 494 and is listed on-line.
Representatives John Conyers and Jan Schakowskfy have also put forward bills that are gaining support. Hers, the “Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act,” would create 2 million jobs fully paid for through separate legislation that “creates higher tax brackets for millionaires and billionaires, eliminates subsidies for Big Oil, and loopholes for corporations that ship American jobs overseas.” Conyers bill reaches for more jobs and also addresses the racist aspects of the jobs crisis. “Official” rates of unemployment are much higher for African Americans and Latinos. None of the proposals would create enough government-sponsored jobs to replace the 8 million lost in the last crisis, let alone the 3 million more that have become necessary since then, but all of them would help.
Bring back the WPA
Rather than focusing on one special proposal, the simple slogan “Bring back the WPA” will probably mobilize the most people. The Works Progress Administration, which focused on public works projects, employed about 8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943, while the CCC gave jobs to 2.5 million unskilled workers. Government-created public works jobs are the only possible solution in the short run. In the long run, reductions in working hours are an absolute necessity. T-shirts like the one shown are available at http://www.printfection.com/BringBackTheWPA.
Politicians use the old Nazi “big lie” technique (repetition) to try to convince Americans that “government cannot create jobs,” even though it’s clear they are lying. The government did in fact create millions of jobs to alleviate the last jobs crisis. Some North Texas congressmen, in recent “town hall” meetings, actually repeated this odious lie! On my Monday radio show on KNON, a caller clarified it all when he said, “If government can’t create jobs, Congressman, then you ought to give back your paycheck, because government sure as heck created YOUR job!”
President Obama is expected to announce a jobs proposal soon. The AFL-CIO, Jobs with Justice, and a long list of at least 70 progressive organizations are organizing a letter to encourage him to come up with a meaningful proposal. The letter is available on-line. The AFL-CIO’s proposal for a tiny “transaction tax” on Wall Street speculations would provide billions for the jobless.
Proposals for resolving the jobs crisis must be the crux of the coming election campaign. President Obama’s plan may put him over the top, or it may drag him backward. The leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Texan Rick Perry, has already made his concern clear by flambuoyantly rejecting $555 million in federal funds for the jobless. Mitt Romney wants to raise the retirement age, which would make it even harder for younger workers to find jobs.
nothing
None of the accomplishments of working people ever happened until they mobilized in public action. There are petitions to sign; vigils, pickets, and rallies to attend, and electoral work just waiting for us to grab them and make them work for us. On this site, we list as many of these opportunities as possible. Please get with us!
Join and/or donate to North Texas Jobs with Justice
Presented by Black Cinemateque and Dallas Peace Center (series: Films for Peace and Justice), Friday, Sept. 16, 8 pm, South Dallas Cultural Center, 3400 South Fitzhugh
Children in War In today’s wars 90 per-cent of the casualties are civilians, compared to 50 per-cent in World War II. During the 1990s, two million children were killed in wars throughout the world. Filmed on location in Bosnia, Rwanda, Israel and North-ern Ireland, this feature-length documentary explores war-torn neighborhoods, orphanages, schools and refu-gee camps. Through the eyes of children, the tragedy of war is witnessed. The children struggle to heal the past through art therapy and self-expression, but their per-sonal traumas are the recurring themes of war and terror-ism: fear of death, threat of physical injury; destruction of homes and displacement; disintegration of families; and the resilience of children in war.
$10 admission, $5 under 18.
For info: 214-426-1683, [email protected]
by David Morris
(reprinted from the Houston Peace and Justice Center, http://www.hpjc.org/node/275)
U.S. military spending now exceeds the spending of all other countries combined.
In all the talk about the federal deficit, why is the single largest culprit
left out of the conversation? Why is the one part of government that best
epitomizes everything conservatives say they hate about government—- waste, incompetence, and corruption—all but exempt from conservative criticism?
Of course, I’m talking about the Pentagon. Any serious battle plan to reduceIn the last decade military spending has soared from $300 billion to $700 billion.
When debt ceilings and deficits seem to be the
only two items on Washington’s agenda, it is both revealing and tragic that both
parties give a free pass to military spending. Representative Paul Ryan’s much
discussed Tea Party budget accepted Obama’s proposal for a pathetic $78 billion
reduction in military spending over 5 years, a recommendation that would only
modestly slow the rate of growth of military spending.
Indeed, the Republican government battering ram appears to have stopped at
the Pentagon door. This was evident early on. As soon as they took over the
House of Representatives, Republicans changed the rules so that military
spending does not have to be offset by reduced spending somewhere else, unlike
any other kind of government spending. It is the only activity of government
they believe does not have to be paid for. Which brings to mind a bit of wisdom from one of their heroes, Adam Smith. “Were the expense of war to be defrayed always by revenue raised within the year … wars would in general be more speedily concluded, and less wantonly undertaken.”
The Tea Party revolution has only strengthened the Republican Party’s resolve
that the Pentagon’s budget is untouchable. An analysis by the Heritage
Foundation of Republican votes on defense spending found that Tea Party freshmen
were even more likely than their Republican elders to vote against cutting any
part of the military budget.
What makes the hypocrisy even more revealing is that the Pentagon turns out
to be the poster child for government waste and incompetence.
In 2009 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found “staggering” cost overruns of almost $300 billion in nearly 70 percent of the Pentagon’s 96 major weapons. What’s more, the programs were
running, on average, 21 months behind schedule. And when they were completed,
they provided less than they promised.
The Defense Logistics Agency had no use for parts worth more than half of the
$13.7 billion in equipment stacked up in DOD warehouses in 2006 to 2008.
And these are only the tips of the military’s misspending iceberg. We really
don’t know how much the Pentagon wastes because, believe it or not, there hasn’t
been a complete audit of the Pentagon in more than 15 years.
In 1994, the Government Management Reform Act required the Inspector General
of each federal agency to audit and publish the financial statements of their
agency. The Department of Defense was the only agency that has been unable to
comply. In fiscal 1998 the Department of Defense used $1.7 trillion of
undocumentable adjustments to balance the books. In 2002 the situation was even
worse. CBS News reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted, “we cannot
track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”
Imagine that a school district were to reveal that it didn’t know where it
spent its money. Now imagine the Republican response. Perhaps, “Off with
their desktops!”
How did Congress’ respond to DOD’s delinquency? It gave it absolution and
allowed it to opt out of its legal requirement. But as a sop to outraged public
opinion Congress required DOD to set a date when it would have its book
sufficiently in order to be audited. Which the Pentagon dutiful did, and missed
every one of the target dates. The latest is 2017 and DOD has already announced
it will be unable to meet that deadline.
Adding insult to injury, last September, the GAO found that the new computer systems intended to improve the Pentagon’s financial oversight are themselves nearly 100 percent or $7 billion
over budget and as much as 12 years behind schedule!
The Pentagon is not just incompetent. It is corrupt. In November 2009 the
Pentagon’s Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the federal watchdog
responsible for auditing oversight of military contractors, raised the question of criminal wrongdoing when it found that the audits that did occur were riddled with serious breaches of auditor
independence. One Pentagon auditor admitted he did not perform detailed tests
because, “The contractor would not appreciate it.”
Why would the Pentagon allow its contractors to get away with fraud? To
answer that question we need to understand the incestuous relationship between
the Pentagon and its contractors that has been going on for years, and is
getting worse. From 2004 to 2008, 80 percent of retiring three and four star
officers went to work as consultants or defense industry executives.
Thirty-four out of 39 three- and four-star generals and admirals who
retired in 2007 are now working in defense industry roles — nearly 90 percent.
Generals are recruited for private sector jobs
well before they retire. Once employed by the military contractor the general
maintains a Pentagon advisory role.
“In almost any other realm it would seem a clear conflict of interest. But
this is the Pentagon where…such apparent conflicts are a routine fact of life”,
an in-depth investigation by the Boston Globe concluded.
U.S. military spending now exceeds the spending of all other countries combined. Knowledge
military experts argue that we can cut at least $1 trillion from the Pentagon
budget without changing its currently expressed mission. But a growing number
believe that the mission itself is suspect. Economic competitors like India and
China certainly approve of our willingness to undermine our economic
competitiveness by diverting trillions of dollars into war and weapons
production. Some argue that all this spending has made us more secure but all
the evidence points in the opposite direction. Certainly our $2 trillion and
counting military adventures in the Middle East and Afghanistan and Pakistan
have won us few friends and multiplied our enemies.
Defense experts Gordon Adams and Matthew Leatherman, writing in the Washington
Post offer another argument against unrestrained military spending.
“Countries feel threatened when rivals ramp up their defenses; this was true
in the Cold War, and now it may happen with China. It’s how arms races are born.
We spend more, inspiring competitors to do the same — thus inflating defense
budgets without making anyone safer. For example, Gates observed in May that no
other country has a single ship comparable to our 11 aircraft carriers. Based on
the perceived threat that this fleet poses, the Chinese are pursuing an
anti-ship ballistic missile program. U.S. military officials have decried this
“carrier-killer’‘ effort, and in response we are diversifying our capabilities
to strike China, including a new long-range bomber program, and modernizing our
carrier fleet at a cost of about $10 billion per ship.”
For tens of millions of Americans real security comes not from fighting wars
on foreign soil but from not having to worry losing their house or their job or
their medical care. As Joshua Holland, columnist for Alternet points out 46 states faced combined budget shortfalls this year of $130 billion, leading them to fire tens of thousands of workers and cut
off assistance to millions of families. Just the supplemental requests for
fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan this year were $170 billion.
What is perhaps most astonishing of all is that cutting the military budget
is wildly popular. Even back in 1995, when military spending was only a fraction
of its present size, a poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes
reported that 42 percent of the US public feeling that defense spending is too
high and a majority of Americans were convinced
that defense spending “has weakened the US economy and given some allies an
economic edge.”
This March Reuters released a new poll that found the majority of Americans support
reducing defense spending.
The next time you hear Republicans insist they want to ferret out government
waste and reduce spending and stamp out incompetence ask them why the one part
of government that exemplifies everything they say is wrong with government is
the one part of government they embrace most heartily.
David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and director of its New Rules Project.
You can follow David at defendingthepublicgood.org
Founded in 2007, the Civilian Soldier Alliance is an organization of civilians working with veterans and active-duty service-members to build a GI resistance movement towards a just foreign policy. They work with and support service-members and veterans to withdraw military support from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, supporting resistance within the military that empowers
Killeen Poetry Slam
Friday August 26, 7-11pm
Under the Hood is proud to host the Killeen Poetry Slam every other Friday kicking off on Friday
August 26!
Refreshments and snacks available.
[Note: This is recurring. Every other Friday, 8/26, 9/9, 9/23]
Women’s Night at Under the Hood
Friday September 16, 7-10pm
A woman’s only space to relax, speak freely and have fun together. More details tba.
Soldier and Veteran Art Showcase
Friday, September 30, 8pm-11pm
Under the Hood will be hosting a Soldier and Veteran’s Art Showcase, where soldiers can display artwork and see what other art is being done by soldiers and veterans in the community. Interested in
submitting artwork? More details to be announced soon.
Operation Recovery Team (Under the Hood, May, 2011)
Friday, August 19, 7-9 pm
at 5604 Manor community center (5604manor.org)
Screening of film on GI coffee house at Fort Lewis, Washington
“Grounds for Resistance,” is a documentary about
the “Coffee Strong” coffee house located outside the Fort Lewis, WA, Army base.
Inspired by the Vietnam-era G.I. coffee house movement, Coffee Strong provides a
safe space where service members, military families, and veterans can gather and
discuss their experiences of war, deployment concerns, the hardships of life in
the military, and veteran benefits.
Aaron Hughes, an organizer with Iraq Vets Against
the War, http://www.ivaw.org/, will be on hand to answer questions and
speak about IVAW’s “Operation Recovery” program to assist active-duty and vets
with issues related to repeated deployments.
Staff and volunteers from the “Under the Hood”
coffee shop in Killeen near Ft. Hood will also be available to answer questions
about their work. http://www.underthehoodcafe.org/
The $5 suggested donation will benefit Under the
Hood.
Location: 5604 Manor, 5604 Manor Road,
Austin, 78723 – 5604manor.org
Striking museum workers, Cairo, Feb 9, 2011 (Ben Curtis-AP)
Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq, Baghdad, May Day, 2011 (USLAW)
Egypt supports Wisconsin (March 2011, USLAW, source unidentified)
In the Deficit & Debt Debate, the Problem Is a Deficit of Facts
by Michael Eisenscher, National Coordinator, U.S. Labor Against the War
July 27th, 2011
[TxLAW note: Where should the cuts be? Who should pay? Here are Eisenscher's suggestions. For the full statement (well worth reading!), see http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=24517]
End the war in Afghanistan and finish withdrawing US troops from
Iraq ($118 billion). Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the
Afghan war isn’t worth fighting. 31% want U.S. troops home from Afghanistan
immediately; another 21% say within a year.[11] They are
right. These wars are not protecting us from Al Qaeda or other terrorist
networks. Instead, they help them recruit.
Close half of our military bases overseas, with appropriate force reductions ($55
billion).
Stop trying to control fossil fuel supplies abroad – at a cost of $103 billion a year.[12] We don’t need to dominate the world’s gas and oil supplies
to guarantee our own security. Investing in sustainable and renewable energy
systems here would make us more secure. But even as is, all the world’s major
suppliers happily sell as much as the U.S. is prepared to buy.
There’s $276 billion – $2.76 trillion over ten years. We could get to $3.5 trillion by
terminating destabilizing Cold War weapons systems, cutting thousands of nuclear
warheads (the ultimate weapons of mass destruction) from our stockpile of 5000,
and actually tackling $60 billion in annual military cost overruns. . . .
If in addition, Bush era tax cuts for the very wealthy were rescinded, a new top
bracket were instituted for millionaires and billionaires, capital gains were
taxed at ordinary income rates rather than the 15% now in effect, a small
transaction tax was applied to speculative stock trades, tax loopholes that
allow the wealthy and large corporations to reduce or evade taxes altogether
were closed, the cap was lifted on maximum income subject to Social Security
taxes ($108,600) so that high earners paid on all their income, the estate tax
were restored to 2008 levels (45% on estates larger than $2 million), a
“Medicare for All” single-payer health plan replaced the for-profit model we
have now – in other words, if the privileged elite actually had to shoulder
their share commensurate with their wealth – the issue of the deficit and debt
would simply evaporate, and Social Security and Medicare would be put on a sound
basis for many decades to come. Add to that the impact of real economic
recovery that puts people back to work, which would bring additional revenues
into the treasury, and we’ d be debating how to spend budget surpluses rather
than whose ox is to be gored.
Tickets, click HERE or call 214-823-7793
MATTHEW HOH
A New Way Forward: Rethinking U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan & Pakistan
Matthew Hoh, Director, Afghanistan Study Group
Matthew Hoh is the Director of the Afghanistan Study Group, a network of foreign and public policy experts and professionals advocating for a change in US strategy in Afghanistan. A former State Department official, Hoh resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan over US strategic policy and goals in Afghanistan in September 2009. His resignation letter has been cited as an Essential Document by the Council on Foreign Relations. Hoh was recently named the 2010 Ridenhour Prize Recipient for Truth Telling.
After two tours of duty in Iraq and serving in the State Department in Washington, D.C., Matthew Hoh became the United States’ senior civilian representative and political adviser in Afghanistan. He resigned five months into his contract, making him the highest-ranking U.S. government official to publicly quit over the war in Afghanistan. He joins us from Washington, D.C., to discuss whether the death of Osama bin Laden means the end of that war.
“Everybody should be asking themselves today in the United States, if Osama Bin Laden was hiding in an upscale villa an hour or two drive north, northeast of Islamabad, then why did we put 50,000 troops in Afghanistan over the last two years?” says Hoh.
When: Thursday, August 11, 2011
Time: Reception 6:30 p.m.; dinner and program at 7:00 p.m.
Where: FunAsia, 1210 E. Beltline Rd., Richardson
info from Dallas Peace Center, http://www.dallaspeacecenter.org/?id=1
