Jonathan Williams strives to answer key questions for activists: "How do we win? How do we get our demands met? We need power. But what is power? How do we get it?" Williams answers these questions like a good community organizer, focusing on leadership development, relationship building, and the organizing of people power, and applying these lessons to the problem of the MIC. Some 20 to 50 percent of members of the U.S. military who have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Williams describes a campaign that is organizing on military bases to remove these troops from the ranks of those available to send into wars.
Ray McGovern provides essential food for activism: inspiration. Helena Cobban pushes us to think our way out of U.S. exceptionalism, which she says has not provided us with privilege but made us less secure and less well off. Lisa Savage presents a model campaign organized in Maine to advance peace and economic conversion, and speaks to the question of communicating with a wider audience. Pat Elder presents a model campaign developed in Maryland and already mentioned by Williams, aimed at preventing the military from testing students and using the test results for recruitment without prior permission. Le Blanc focuses on exactly where our activism is needed now as regards our senators and misrepresentatives in Congress.
The final speech at the conference, and the final article here, is by Bruce Levine. Some participants, after listening to Bruce, told me we'd saved the best for last. This is a book, so you can feel free to read him first. Levine presents some surprising causes of inaction and solutions to fueling activism through recovery from "corporatocracy abuse" and "battered people's syndrome," allowing us to develop "anti-authoritarianism, individual self- respect, collective self-confidence, courage, determination, and solidarity." Section VI consists of a song that we sang to conclude the three-day event. Never underestimate the power of singing.
The primary product of the military industrial complex is, of course, war, but this is not a book about war, not exactly. For one thing, U.S. wars are fought in other countries, not here. But this was not an international conference. Over 90 percent of the people killed in U.S. wars are not from the United States, yet their loved-ones' voices were not a part of this conference. This was predominantly a gathering of U.S. residents in the U.S. to talk about what can be done in the U.S. As such, it can be repeated in other U.S. cities. Do try this at home. Yet, as with most peace movement events, this was a gathering of speakers and participants overwhelmingly motivated by the desire to avoid killing foreign human beings. We talked about other things. We talked about the arguments that would bring into the room in theory all of the people who were not there in reality, the people who care about the environment or the economy or civil liberties but not (or not so much) about halting the mass-murder of non-Americans. The argument that Bruce Gagnon makes most explicitly in these pages, for peace activists to shift to talking about jobs instead of peace, stands, from a certain angle, in conflict with the inspiring case that Ray McGovern and Lisa Savage make for pursuing the justice that is in your heart regardless of outcome or with an awareness that the impact may be distant, indirect, and undetectable. In my view this conflict is best resolved by pursuing both strategies: preaching the immorality of war and explaining how the MIC deprives us of jobs. Since when is having two arguments for one change in policy a weakness? We can't move funding away from wars if people believe that wars are just. And we can't get everyone's attention focused on the topic of war until we explain the relationship to their own well being. We will have to explain this to more and more people as wars change their appearance, drones replace soldiers, and what Ben Davis describes below as "dark matter" expands.
This conference was held and this book published in the context of an Obama presidency that is accelerating the advance of the military industrial complex, but is perceived in many quarters as doing the exact opposite. President Obama has increased the size, cost, privatization, and global presence of the U.S. military. He has, with his War on Libya, established the prerogative to take the nation into war against the will of the United States Congress. He has created drone warfare on a significant scale. He has enlarged and formalized due-process-free imprisonment, and cemented in place warrantless spying and the power to abuse prisoners. He has expanded the use of assassination, including of U.S. citizens. President Obama has radically expanded claims of state secrets to protect the crimes of his predecessor, and made greater use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Obama has formalized, legalized, systematized, and normalized what was illicit under Bush. He has pursued base construction and expansion of missile "defense" systems to the detriment of U.S. relations with China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan, among other nations. Like all presidents during this permanent war, Obama is a war president. Unlike all other Nobel Peace Prize recipients, Obama praised war in his acceptance speech. In November 2012, U.S. voters are likely to face a choice for president between two major party candidates both of whom favor outrageous spending on war preparation, with the range of debate likely at best to extend from spending 60% of discretionary spending on the military to 70%. This spending benefits a very small and very wealthy elite, but does serious damage to 99% of us.
The MIC50 conference was held the same weekend as the initial unnoticed action by Occupy Wall Street. Some of us had supported the planning for that action and, as you'll see in the remarks below, had for a long time been planning to start occupying Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., on October 6, 2011 -- an occupation still underway as I write this in December. The first widely seen pepper spraying incident at Occupy Wall Street was a week after the MIC50 conference, and the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge was on October 1st. Helena Cobban's remarks below point to a major inspiration for the occupation of both D.C. and Wall Street, namely Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, where a popular movement had overthrown a president in January 2011.
We must vote, just as Egyptians must vote, but voting alone will get us nowhere good. Our government will halt the foreclosures on our homes only after we have halted the foreclosures on our homes. Our government will forgive student debt only after we have blocked its payment. Our government will regulate Wall Street only after we have divested from it. And our government will stop dumping our hard-earned pay into wars we don't want and cannot survive only when we have made that path (that running of the gauntlet of K Street's opposition) easier for every type of misrepresentative than continuing on the current trajectory. Shifting our demand from "Jobs Not Cuts" to "Jobs Not Wars" is an important and valuable step. But simultaneously working on our vision for a better community could result in the future in the ability to dream so big that our dearest wish, in an extravagantly over-wealthy country, is no longer merely for jobs.
The following articles will stimulate your thinking. I have tried to leave each author/speaker their own style and voice. I've kept endnotes, turned footnotes into endnotes, and turned hyperlinks into endnotes or removed them.
I want to thank Jason Leopold of PubRecord.org for permission to reprint Chris Rodda's article, and the same Jason Leopold but this time of TruthOut.org for permission to reprint Steve Horn and Allen Ruff's. Gareth Porter's article was originally published by Inter Press Service. The authors' photos were taken during the conference by and donated by Tom Cogill, with the exception of those of Jeff Fogel, Bunny Greenhouse, and Karen Kwiatkowski. Those three were provided by the authors. The image on the front cover was created by Barbara Stanley of Skipper Graphics. The image of Jefferson, Eisenhower, and King was created by Wally Myers. The images in Dave Shreve's and Mia Austin Scoggins' articles were provided by the authors. The pie charts in my article on "We the 99% Demand a Different Budget" were produced by an online tool programmed by Karl Anliot.
A great deal of
credit goes to John Heuer for bringing the idea for this conference to Charlottesville, building
on a prior event held in Greensboro, North Carolina. Tony Russell and Jon Kessler did much of the
planning in Charlottesville, along
with Linda Lisanti, Brandon Collins, Ryan DeRamus, Bill Lankford, Hisham Ashur, Virginia Rovnyak, and Kirk
Bowers, along with many others.
Wally Myers, Clare Hanrahan, and Coleman Smith were also involved in the planning. Countless wonderful
people helped out during the three
days of the conference itself. The Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice was an early and
big supporter. Further support came from the Eisenhower Chapter (NC Triangle) of Veterans for
Peace, Peace First, Augusta
Coalition for Peace and Justice, Amnesty International Group 157, Richmond Peace Education
Center, Foreign Policy in Focus, The
Good Earth, The Political Club of Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC), Jeff Clements, John
Heuer, Sherry Stanley, Phyllis Albritton,
Ann Wright, and anonymous but generous donors. The Camino Restaurant donated delicious food and
cake. Sha Llel donated the audio equipment
and made the technology run smoothly enough to hardly be noticed. The Haven and PVCC were very
hospitable venues. Mayor Dave Norris,
City Council Member Kristin Szakos, and then candidate but now City Council Member-Elect Dede Smith
participated in the conference, and
we appreciated their support. Three is a majority on a city council of five, and we look forward to strong
steps toward economic conversion. David
Swanson is the author of When the World Outlawed War, War Is A Lie, and Daybreak: Undoing the
Imperial Presidency and Forming a
More Perfect Union. He blogs at davidswanson.org and warisacrime.org and works for the online activist
organizations rootsaction.org and
democrats.com.
Read the Book: http://MIC50.org
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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