Tag: education

‘Ides of Trump’ Action Aims to Send More Mail Than White House Can Ignore

Posted on by kathiemm
Published on Monday, March 13, 2017 by Common Dreams

We “will overwhelm Washington…and we will bury the White House post office in pink slips, all informing the president that he’s fired!”

by
Nadia Prupis, staff writer

“So sharpen your wit, unsheathe your writing implements, and write from the heart,” the organizers say. (Photo: Ides of Trump)

A new movement is aiming to mail at least 1 million postcards to President Donald Trump on Wednesday, March 15—historically dubbed “the Ides of March” and known as the day Julius Caesar was assassinated—to show “the man, the media, and the politicians how vast our numbers are…to make it irrefutable that the president’s claim of wide support is a farce.”

“He may draw a big crowd with empty promises, but the crowd of those that oppose his agenda is exponentially larger. And we will show up to protest, to vote, and to be heard. Again and again and again,” the group, which calls itself the Ides of Trump, explained on its website and Facebook page.

The group outlines five steps to participate:

  1. Write one postcard. Write a dozen! Create your own cards, buy them, share them, it doesn’t matter as long as you write #TheIdes or #TheIdesOfTrump on them somewhere.
  2.  Take a picture of your cards and post them on social media (tagged with #TheIdesOfTrump or #TheIdes, please). This will help us verify our numbers.
  3. Spread the word! Everyone on Earth can let Washington know their opinion of the President. They can’t build a wall high enough to stop the mail.
  4. Then, on March 15th, mail your cards to:
    The President (for now) 
    The White House
    1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
    NW Washington, DC 20500
  5. Get ready for the NEXT postcard campaign, and the next, and the next—because we’re not going away. We will make ourselves heard by joining together. And together, we will wield the kind of political clout that can’t be ignored.

As Leslie Evans, an artist and printmaker who produced about 900 postcards for the event last week in Watertown, Massachusetts, told the Boston Globe on Monday, “Obviously, numbers matter a lot to [Trump.]” Her postcards feature slogans that paraphrase chants commonly heard at anti-Trump protests, such as “Compassion, not fear, immigrants are welcome here,” and “Hear our voice, you are not the majority choice.”

The Ides of Trump also makes clear that while the basis is comical, the impetus is not.

“So sharpen your wit, unsheathe your writing implements, and write from the heart,” they write. “All of our issues—DAPL [the Dakota Access Pipeline], women’s rights, racial discrimination, religious freedom, immigration, economic security, education, the environment, conflicts of interest, the existence of facts—can and should find common cause. That cause is to make it irrefutable that the president’s claim of wide support is a farce.”

“[W]e, in vast numbers, from all corners of the world, will overwhelm Washington,” the organizers write, “and we will bury the White House post office in pink slips, all informing the president that he’s fired!”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

How to Feed the Power Hungry

Posted on by kathiemm
Cartoon from the records of the National Child Labor Committee (U.S.). During the Progressive Era many organizations were formed to outlaw the child labor that was a feature of Gilded Age industrial revolution, which included teenage girls working long hours in mills. The cartoon shows a child laborer supporting the world with her labor, including an uncaring robber baron industrialist.
Image is in the public domain.

There are two easy ways to feed the voracious power-wielding groups in this country, those contemporary robber barons who gobble up the sustenance, the lives, the well-being of millions of people and the planet on which they struggle to survive:

1) Succumb to their lies, their distortions, their fear-mongering, their racism, their endless worship of capitalism, and their militarization of everything; how succumb? by voting for them;

and

2) Don’t vote. Stay home. Tell yourself, the world is an unholy mess. Your vote won’t matter. There is no difference between political parties. That’ll get them. Not.

This is a big year. Another Presidential election, Congressional elections, other elections, and if you’re a US citizen 18 or over, you have the right to vote. There may be no right more important than that one. Thousands of people were locked up, beaten, and murdered so that you and your compatriots would have that right.

From small communities to the nation as a whole, countless decisions are decided by votes. Congress votes to preserve or destroy forests, wildlife, the atmosphere.

The President votes by approving or vetoing Congressional votes.

Community level governments decide whether or not to put more money into education, recreation, local social services based on voter behavior.

It’s not too late to make a new year’s resolution and this one won’t involve giving up things you like.

Vote.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

War costs money*

Posted on by patdaniel

*and it’s OUR money.

During the past month, Engaging Peace has offered a number of perspectives on the financial aspects of war.  Some highlights:

  • The true costs of war are difficult to determine because of the intricacies of federal budgeting and accounting, as well as the use of deficit spending
  • Some of the financial impacts of war will occur in the future, due to veterans’ benefits and social costs to families of returning service people
  • Aside from the direct costs, war has a generalized negative effect on the economy, as seen in fewer jobs, increased debt, diversion of money from health care, education, environment, and other domestic needs
  • War tax resistance is a method that some have used to protest the funding of war by tax dollars

Despite the challenges of determining the accurate costs of war, totals for the Iraq war alone are estimated to be as high as $4-6 trillion.

To learn more specifics about the costs to the U.S., check out the Costs of War project.  For perspective from the U.K., watch a video on the economic impact of Britain’s involvement in U.S.-led wars.

You might wonder who is paying the taxes that support the war machine. It’s ordinary people like you and me–and not the most wealthy or the corporations that often profit from war efforts.

As an outgrowth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a number of groups across the U.S. are calling attention to inequities in our tax structure–specifically the low tax rates paid by the 1%. For example, in Boston, a Tax Day march and rally on April 17 will be based on the message “Corporations and the 1%: Pay your taxes! Fund our communities!” Minneapolis, San Francisco, and other communities have also focused attention on these disparities.

The world economy is hurting. The pocketbooks and bank accounts of ordinary citizens are hurting. We feel it especially during tax season in the midst of what feels like a never-ending recession.

How to ease the pain and start the money flowing again?  The answer is clear:  Stop the wars.

Pat Daniel, Ph.D., Managing Editor of Engaging Peace

$300 billion in social costs (Cost of war, Part 4)

Posted on by kathiemm

[The final post in the series by guest author Neta Crawford]

Now we come to the fourth reason our estimates for the dollar costs of these wars have been too low. Federal spending is not the entire cost of the Iraq war. There are several other huge categories of economic costs.

Targeting military spending
Targeting military spending; photo by Joe Mabel. Used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. From Wikimedia Commons.

There will be at least $300 billion in social costs of these wars, much of it borne by the close family members of injured veterans.

There are the macro-economic effects of borrowing for war, namely increased interest. Further, there is the opportunity cost of military spending.

The two largest opportunity costs are the consequences of the deferred maintenance of U.S. infrastructure and the potential jobs created by other forms of federal spending.

We are constantly told that military spending creates jobs. Indeed, every $1 billion in military spending creates about 11,200 jobs. If there were tax cuts instead and people spent that money themselves, more than 15,000 jobs could be created.

Indeed, military spending produces fewer jobs compared with spending on housing or non-residential construction, health care, or education.

Americans have been told at least three times — in May 2003 when the mission was “accomplished”; in September 2010 when the “combat” phase was over, and in December 2011 — that the Iraq war was won and over. All that was left was promoting democratization and stability.

But is the war really over for either Iraqis or Americans? Iraq remains extremely violent. Thousands of U.S. State Department and private contractors will remain in Iraq for the indefinite future. As Catherine Lutz wrote recently in Foreign Policy, “5,500 security personnel join 4,500 ‘general life support’ contractors who will be working to provide food, health care, and aviation services to those employed in Iraq, and approximately 6,000 US federal employees from State and other agencies.”

The dollar costs of war, as Eisenhower said more than a half-century ago, means dreams deferred or lost for millions. A few years before that, George Orwell’s main character in 1984, Winston Smith, wrote, “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

The next step in a full picture of the Iraq war’s toll would be to account for the death, displacement, and economic devastation the war has caused in Iraq and the region.

Neta C. Crawford is a Professor of Political Science at Boston University and co-director of the Costs of War study (www.costsofwar.org).