Urgent: Youth Need Your Help To Get Recruiters Out

In the wake of protests of 6 years of the Iraq occupation, we are receiving requests from students and teachers to bring the We Are Not Your Soldiers Tour to their schools. We can't get to them without your help! $12,000 is needed by April 15th. Donate today to bring Iraq & Afghanistan veterans into high schools across the country.

Thousands of students need to be reached in the next two months, encouraged to not join the army and to forge a student movement to get recruiters out of the schools as part of halting all the wars.

This tour is needed to reach these youth now:

Friday, Barack Obama announced he is sending 4,000 troops to Afghanistan in addition to the 17,000 troops he announced last month. This is not change! This is an escalation of a crime against humanity. What are these troops being sent to do? What are the youth being recruited for? The murder, rape, and torture of innocent men, women, and children; to kick down doors and terrorize families... all so that the U.S. can tighten its stranglehold on the land, resources, and shipping routes of Middle East.

Where will these troops that Obama is sending come from? The military recruiters have budget of billions to recruit youth who are in high school now. They roam the hallways and lunch-rooms, call students at home, and set up at malls where kids hang out. The military cannot fight this expanded "war on terror" in Afghanistan without this fresh cannon fodder. Military recruiters now have almost unlimited access to reach high school students because the "No Child Left Behind" law ties funding for schools to whether recruiters can get to students.

Since November 24 the WANYS Tour has been to x amount of high schools and x colleges reaching x amount of students. The tour has hit the Bay Area, LA, Chicago, New York, . Most of the schools have been predominently Black and Latino and almost all of them have been working class - exactly the students that the recruiters are targeting. When recruiters come into their school, students need to know exactly what they are being recruited for. Not freedom, not democracy, and not better "career options."

Speakers on the tour give students reasons not to go into the military, and help organize collective resistance to recruiters' lies by spreading visible mass resistance to joining this military as a part of stopping this war of terror for empire.

Classroom presentations include a short presentation by a World Can't Wait youth organizer and an Iraq and/or Afghanistan war veteran, a 10-minute video clip of testimony by Iraq veterans from the March 2008 Winter Soldier hearings about what they witnessed and perpetrated and footage of high school students protesting military recruiters along with an open discussion. At the end we conduct a short survey to give us a sense of what young people are thinking.

This takes funding. As a movement of the people we rely entirely on your support. Speakers are ready, students want us to come, and we are ready to organize another even stronger round especially with the latest intolerable surge in Afghanistan, but we can't send the tour out until we have the money….$12,000 are needed by April 15th to cover transportation/lodging costs, provide modest stipends to the speakers, produce organizing kits for students, promote the tour on Facebook and other youth oriented sites and create T-shirts and stickers to spread the word.

Donate generously so that World Can't Wait can continue this tour reaching thousands more students before the end of this school year with the truth of what they are being recruited for!

To learn more about the tour, watch videos, and meet the vets visit wearenotyoursoldiers.org

Sincerely, Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can't Wait

P.S. This tour and the Iraq Vets that are a part of it are extremely precious in a time where so many have given up the fight to stop these wars. Support them - spread the resistance - donate generously today to help us raise the $12,000 we need by April 15th. 

$12,000 for travel & stipends needed by April 15 to schedule the last 2 months of high school classes around the U.S.

From a New York City teacher after the tour:

At the time the "We Are Not Your Soldiers" tour visited, my students were preparing to take the New York State Regents exam. Many of my students have failed the exam at least two times. As their last shot before making the decision to drop out or get a GED, I was concerned that failing the regents exam would encourage some of my students to join the military instead.

Matthis Chiroux, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and Elaine Brower, member of the World Can't Wait, hosts of the "We Are Not Your Soldiers" tour, presented a compelling excerpt of the "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan Eyewitness Accounts" testimonials which summoned the visual and emotional interest of otherwise unresponsive youth. Matthis engaged the students with his own personal recollection of the military. He asked important questions, revealing truths of the racism of the war on Iraq, and connected to the personal lives of the students, while Elaine Brower offered the perspective of a mother, a point of view many of my students are sensitive to having been raised by only their mothers.

After the World Can't Wait presentation, it was apparent that my students were affected. The next day one student showed me a poem he wrote about a young boy from the ghetto enlisting in the military and dying, another asked for a World Can't Wait T-shirt, and yet another, who had wanted to join the military, handed me a recommendation form for a vocational school. Others are still lost forever to the military but the "We Are Not Your Soldiers" tour offered the education American youth really need and that more teachers need to be more conscious of.

Request for the tour from a student:

My school has an immense problem with military recruitment - they are here every day, in the classrooms, in the lunchroom. At least 1/4 of our graduates join the military, as this is a fairly rural community and people don't believe they have many options.

I want to request details of the tour, and how to arrange a visit, what it would cost, etc. The school has agreed to permit it (grudgingly), but it would not be an easy audience.

Any information you could send would be extremely helpful. Thank you. Jenny E.

Spanish court may indict Bush officials

Spanish Court May Indict Bush Officials

The indictment and prosecution of Bush administration officials is becoming a reality.

"A Spanish court has agreed to consider opening a criminal case against six former Bush administration officials," the Associated Press confirmed.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas, former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes are under scrutiny for sanctioning torture in violation of the Geneva conventions. Under Spanish law, the courts have jurisdiction to prosecute war criminals and torturers anywhere in the world. A judge has already called on prosecutors to review the charges.

Clearly, millions of people worldwide stand with the mission of IndictBushNow and all those who are fighting for accountability. Click this link to make a donation to support the ongoing work of the indictment movement.

This world wide movement will lead to criminal prosecution for the crimes committed by Bush, Cheney and others. This first step is a direct result of the pressure brought by you and millions of other people in the United States and around the world.

You can help make this movement grow by encouraging your friends to sign the referendum calling for the indictment of Bush and Cheney at http://www.indictbushnow.org/. Join with signers from all over the United States and all over the world. Spread the word by circulating this email, and putting the web button on your blog, MySpace or facebook page.

Your donation provides the support needed to power the demand to Indict Bush into a national and worldwide force. Please click here to support these efforts with a generous donation now.

-- All of us at IndictBushNow.org

From Street Action to Legislative Action

Message "Indict Bush Now" Rings Out from Coast to Coast
Now: from Street Action to Legislative Action





The IndictBushNow movement made major headway on Saturday. Thousands of people took to the streets in cities across the country to call for an end to Bush's most criminal legacy: the Iraq war. Many of the participants carried "Indict Bush Now" placards and chanted "Bring the Troops Home -- Indict Bush Now!"

These were terrific first events for the IndictBushNow movement, showing that the people of this country will neither forgive nor forget the disastrous and deadly Bush administration.

To help this movement grow, please take a moment and make a generous donation now, so that we can make the case for indictment in the mass media, in the halls of Congress, at every every anti-war demonstration, and in the growing movement for economic justice.

It's time to flood Congress with letters demanding a Special Prosecutor to pursue the indictment of Bush and other high officials from his administration. Over 200 organizations have united to press for a Special Prosecutor. The human misery caused by the economic crisis is only growing and the unimaginable suffering caused by the Bush administration's intentional policies of torture and wars of aggression continues.

We must force the media to report on the culpability of Wall Street's political enablers -- namely, the Bush administration. After charging over a trillion dollars on the nation's credit card -- to go to war and to give kickbacks to his Wall Street friends -- Bush simply jumped the bill. He has to be held accountable.

Now is the time to take a minute and send a letter to your Congressional representatives. Last week a leaked memo from the International Red Cross detailed the barbaric and sadistic acts of torture by the Bush administration. Insist that your Congressional representatives carry out their sworn duty to defend the Constitution by supporting the call for a Special Prosecutor for Bush. There are currently different committees and investigations reviewing the Bush administration's defense of torture and its politically-biased appointees in the judicial branch. But fact-finding missions are not enough. We need prosecution. We need indictment.

Click this link to send a letter to your Congressional representative. It only takes a minute and is very easy to do.

We're on the right path -- now let's keep up the good work.

-- All of us at IndictBushNow.org

Action Page: Investigate Cheney's Personal Assassination Ring

Remember when former Vice President used to claim that he constituted
a peculiar fourth branch of government unto himself, claiming
executive privilege as part of the executive branch, while with the
next breath refusing to obey executive branch record keeping laws?
Now we beginning to find out what that fourth branch of government
actually was . . . his own private worldwide assassination ring.
Somehow we don't recall the U.S. Constitution providing for such a
fourth co-equal branch of our government.

Even those who argue that the president has the power as "commander
in chief" to commit war crimes with impunity, do not argue that the
Vice President should be able to operate his own war crimes franchise
independent of the president. And yet, according to Seymour Hersh, a
most reliable source, that is exactly what took place. Cheney was
running his own personal assassination squad, reporting directly to
himself.

Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum944.php

Is there no level of treason outrageous enough to get one of the
other two branches of government to confront these crimes against the
Constitution? The justice department must immediately appoint a
special prosecutor. Failing that, Congress must launch its own
investigation, as called for by the always heroic Dennis Kucinich, to
get to the bottom of this. Please submit this action page to speak
out to them all.

We are doing alerts on many other issues as you all know. For
example, continuing to press for single payer health care which the
overwhelming majority favor if asked, and to derail proposals that
would actually harm the safety of our food supply even more, while we
work on our own positive alternatives. But the staggering criminality
of the previous administration cannot be swept under the rug without
endorsing even worse abuses for the future, so we must stay on that
as well.

One need only observe how quickly Congress can move when there is
real public outrage, like over the AIG bonus scandal, to realize that
all we need to do is speak out in sufficient numbers to instantly
have any policy change we want. We did not even have to do an alert
on that one. They say these were "retention" bonuses. We happen to
think the kind of retention those recipients deserve is arrest and
incarceration, for fraud on a scale that dwarfs even Madoff.

This is just a way of saying the purpose of this resource has always
been to encourage more people to speak out more often. When we are
most successful in doing that, we DO have policy victories. All we
have to do to achieve more such victories is to believe that our
voices really can have an impact, and to act on that belief.

From time to time we will get an email from someone including
language like "they'll never listen to us" or something equally
defeatist as that. What we must understand is that we have only one
real enemy, our OWN defeatism, for that is all that stands between us
and generating policy moving numbers with every alert. Those evil
forces that work against the people's interest DEPEND on such voices
of despair and resignation to do most of their dirty work for them.

So let us take advantage of every possible opportunity to speak out.
We created this resource so that with one click you can register your
voice with all your members of Congress and other pressure points at
the same time. The more you use the resource the more we will win.
And we WILL win more and more.

We are working to pack up the next bulk shipment of the new "Convict
Dick & W" caps to go out by the end of the week, so if you have not
requested yours yet, you can use this link, and we'll get it out to
you as fast as we can.

Convict Dick Caps: http://www.peaceteam.net/convict_cap.php

Thank you for your participation.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

Urgent: Stop Corporate Fascists From Taking Over Our Food Supply

We told you about this issue last week and many of you
responded. But we still need your comments with the USDA by the end
of the day, Monday, March 16, to stop the incredibly destructive
corporate scheme described below. Congress is already trying to stack
the deck so only lobbyists have a meaningful voice in this debate. We
can stop them if you speak out now.

Radio Chip Animal Identification Would Do ALL Harm To Our Real Food
Safety, And No Good

It would be too easy to blame the recent peanut panic on one criminal
corporation owner, who KNOWINGLY shipped Salmonella contaminated
product. But before that it was millions of pounds of ground beef,
and before that tomatoes all over the country, and on and on. And
when you ask where is all this horrible filth coming from, with a
over a million cases of Salmonella in the U.S. alone every year, the
answer is self-evident. It's the huge factory farms that overflow
with seas of untreated animal waste, that then spill into our food
supply, including through our agricultural plant crop fields.

We have a lot of work to do to clean up this giant mess, but the
first thing we have to do is STOP a lunatic boondoggle being pushed
by these same corporate interests, to force radio computer chip
implanting of literally every farm animal in the country, EXCEPT on
their own factory farms. It is absolutely nothing but a further
attempt to drive small family farms out of business, who in fact are
our safest source of reliably clean food now.

The proposed National Animal Identification System (NAIS) would force
even the smallest healthy farms to buy expensive new computer
tracking equipment, and potentially would subject them to
gestapo-like tactics by the USDA if they are in even slight technical
non-compliance. And all this just to fatten the pockets of the RFID
chip manufacturers, and to make it LOOK like something is being done
to make our food safer.

The special one click action page below will send your personal
message to all your members Congress and also directly to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture who is trying to rush this thing through
without adequate scrutiny.

Stop NAIS Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum942.php

This action is especially urgent because the U.S. House Agriculture
Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry is holding a hearing on
NAIS implementation on March 11, and many farm activists fear the
plan is to push it out for a full vote in Congress faster than a
greased pig, before we the people have a meaningful chance to speak
out.

You may not have a House member on that particular subcommittee, but
you can pressure your own House member to tell they colleagues on it
that there is massive constituent pressure against NAIS. For the
especially mobilized on the action page above there is a link to the
phone numbers for those on the subcommittee, because they are in fact
your representative as an American citizen if they sit on it.

Below are some more extensive truth points you can select from in
drafting your comments or on the phone, again linked to from the
action page above.

NAIS was designed by NIAA (the National Institute of Animal
Agriculture), a corporate consortium consisting of Monsanto,
industrial meat producers such as Cargill and Tyson, and surveillance
companies such Viatrace, AgInfoLink, and Digital Angel. The NAIS
scheme fits agribusiness, biotech, and surveillance companies to a T:

1) They are already computerized, and they engineered a corporate
loophole: If an entity owns a vertically integrated, birth-to-death
factory system with thousands of animals (as the Cargills and Tysons
do), it does not have to tag and track each one but instead a herd is
given a single lot number.

2). NAIS will only be burdensome and costly (fees, tags, computer
equipment, time) to small farmers which helps push them out of
business, thus leaving more market to giant agribusiness.

3) Agribusiness wants to reassure export customers that the US meat
industry is finally cleaning up its widespread contamination. NAIS
would give that appearance ... without incurring the cost of a real
cleanup.

4) NAIS will allow total control over the competition: Owners of even
a single chicken would be required to register private information,
the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of their 'premise'
and if any animal leaves its 'premise', the owner will be required to
obtain an ID number for it and have the animal microchipped. All
information, including 24 hour GPS surveillance would be fed into a
vast corporate data bank, allowing for ease of false slaughter to
hide true problems or to substitute biotech's genetically engineered
animals.

5) NAIS may allow plundering of farmers through required DNA samples:
DNA samples would be invaluable to Monsanto and biotech corporations
genetically engineering animals. Farmers who raise heritage breeds
would have no say in how their distinct DNA would be used and to the
sole profit of biotech companies.

6) The advantage for the surveillance companies is obvious:
Compulsory tagging of 6 million sheep, 7 million horses, 63 million
hogs, 97 million cows, 260 million turkeys, 300 million laying hens,
9 billion chickens, and untold numbers of bison, alpaca, quail, and
other animals -- and new animals being born, means a massive
self-perpetuating market.

Please take action now to stop this insanity. Our health and our
lives depend on it.

Stop NAIS Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum942.php

The health claims for NAIS are a sham though fear of disease is used
to advance it. NAIS does not touch the contaminated source of E.coli,
salmonella, listeria, mad cow, and common meat-borne diseases - the
inherently unhealthy practices (mass crowding, growth stimulants,
feeding regimens, rushed assembly lines, poor sanitation, etc.) of
industrial-scale meat operations. Upton Sinclair's "Jungle" all over
again. NAIS will do nothing to stop these practices. Moreover,
tracking ends at the time of slaughter, yet it's from slaughter
onward that most spoilage occurs. But NAIS does not trace any
contamination after slaughter.

The self-serving Agribusiness NAIS plan distracts from their
contaminatory practices, while targeting hundreds of thousands of
small farms, homesteaders, organic producers, hobbyists ... and maybe
even you. NAIS's purpose is to advance corporate monopoly over all
food in the US. And with it, they have laid the ground work.
Kissinger said if you control food, you can control people. This
immense corporate plan to control of our food supply and eliminate
our independent farmers is, at it heart, the most severe threat
possible to our democracy itself.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

Rove and Miers Under Oath; Wexler Supports Commission

Great news on our shared campaign for accountability:

ROVE AND MIERS UNDER OATH
In an agreement reached yesterday, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers have finally agreed to testify under oath and under the penalty of perjury regarding the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. Rove will also be questioned regarding the politically motivated prosecution of former Gov. Donald Siegelman of Alabama.

This is a validation of your efforts and a victory for accountability and the legitimate power of Congress. I am grateful for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s and Chairman Conyer's efforts and I strongly agree with her statement yesterday that “no one is above the law and Congressional subpoenas must be complied with.”

Please know that under this agreement the Judiciary Committee has reserved the right to have public testimony from both Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. I expect the information we receive from the testimony of these individuals will open a window of truth into the decisions made by Bush Administration on many areas where wrongdoing has been alleged.

Click Here to Support My Progressive Outreach

MY SUPPORT FOR THE SPECIAL COMMISSION INVESTIGATION OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
In further news, I have added my name as a cosponsor to Chairman Conyers’ bill, HR104, which establishes a special commission to investigate Bush Administration abuses. If enacted, this legislation would be a major step forward in our search for the truth.

This legislation would investigate the broad range of Bush Administration policies including the secret detaining of prisoners by the intelligence community, the use by US personal of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” that are not authorized by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, “ghosting”, extraordinary rendition, domestic warrantless electronic surveillance, and all other policies or issues that the established Commission deems essential and relevant.

This is an important piece of legislation and the issues at stake are large enough that we can’t merely sweep them under the rug.

Lastly, thank you for the tremendous response to the survey in my last email. The top three issues were (Economy, Accountability, and Healthcare each with about 18% of the vote). When asked to pick your single most important issue, 24% chose the Economy (the highest one).

I will stay in touch.

As always, this national outreach is paid for out of my campaign account. If you would like to contribute to this outreach and new initiatives to drive our progressive agenda, please click here.

Best wishes,

Congressman Robert Wexler

DONATE

Yes, Actually, We Do Need To Bring Back The Fairness Doctrine

A couple of weeks ago all of the monolith of right wing radio was
literally hysterical about the possibility that the Fairness Doctrine
might be brought back. And then all of a sudden on Feb 26, 2009, with
no other warning, a nauseatingly named and so-called "Broadcaster
Freedom Act" was passed as an amendment to the DC voting rights bill
in the Senate. It happened so fast that none of the congressional
bill tracking sites have an update on this yet.

We're of the opinion that the handful of hostile corporations who
have such a death grip on our political speech right now don't need
any more "freedom" to suppress even paid commercials they don't agree
with, and to coordinate secret advertiser boycotts of the few
progressive outlets in the so-called "free" market. The only point of
Broadcaster Dictatorship provision is to make the current extreme
wingnut bias of our media permanent, and to hold the DC voting rights
provision for ransom to do it.

Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum943.php

Probably never before has such a hideously misleading provision been
snuck into a totally unrelated bill on such flimsy pretext. And had
the ideological greedheads behind it not also pushed for adding the
additional groaning baggage of an enshrinement of wild west gun
ownership rights into the same bill, it might have already been
passed into law. Please contact your members of Congress with the
action page above and tell them to make sure the Broadcaster Freedom
to Monopolize Our Airwaves Act does not make it into law.

The reason why the right wing is so petrified about the return of
real fairness to our media is that it is only by perpetuating
monopoly over the major news sources that they can effectively
exclude alternative viewpoints from public debate. For example, the
widely supported (by the public) proposals for transforming our
national health care into a vastly more efficient single payer system
are not even allowed to be discussed on most outlets. It is their
last ditch attempt to stop the march of people's democracy.

Curiously, many of our progressive radio talkers seem to bend over
backwards to put an inordinate number of abusive right wing jerks on
the air, perhaps to demonstrate that eventually they can lose
arguments to loudmouths who just keep repeating the same discredited
talking points over and over, kind of a self imposed quasi Fairness
Doctrine. Or perhaps they themselves are compelled to do so by their
own corporate overlords.

But just as nobody in the right wing would ever put on anyone who was
an effective advocate to the left of them, save for an occasional
token punching bag, you can be sure NONE of the so-called liberals on
the air right now would ever put on anyone who challenged them for
taking too many right wing positions themselves. Even now, when truly
progressive candidates run for office they are literally blacked out
of coverage even on so-called progressive channels.

Only by in fact bringing back the Fairness Doctrine can we cure the
current de facto and oppressive censorship of truly progressive
views.

Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum943.php

For those of you who have already requested yours, we are pleased to
report that all the remaining ordered "Convict Dick & W" caps went
out no later than this last Friday, please allow a week or so more in
transit and we thank you for your patience, we are restocking as fast
as we can.

Speaking of the ongoing war crimes accountability movement, there
were new revelations this week of how far off the deep end the Bush
Administration had gone in laying the foundation of a permanent right
wing police state, backed by secret legal memos which members of
Congress were not even allowed to see. Now even Republicans like
Specter are admitting that a special prosecutor might be needed, but
it will ONLY actually happen if we keep the pressure up, and demand
that only deterrence can save the future of our Constitution.

And isn't it interesting how quickly a state county prosecutor jumped
up to try and crucify Roland Burris for possibly inconsistent
statements related to his recent Senate appointment? The Sangamon, IL
County prosecutor is demanding any FBI telephone transcripts of
Burris to try to drum up a perjury prosecution. Rather pales in
significance to the murder of over 4,000 American service men and
women in Iraq over a totally phony casus belli, doesn't it?

So let us keep the heat on local state prosecutors to indict Bush and
Cheney for murder as counseled by Vince Bugliosi, and you can use the
local prosecutor lookup on the page below to instantly lookup the
contact information for your own local district attorney. Remember,
they were all sent copies of the Bugliosi book courtesy of another
activist group, together with a personal letter from Vince offering
his assistance in any way.

Local Prosecutor Lookup: http://www.peaceteam.net/convict_cap.php

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.