NEWS

An unidentified Palestinian mother and daughter protest Jewish settlements in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Feb. 11, 2011. Photo credit: Ryan Rodrick Beiler / Shutterstock.com.

By Odile Hugonot Haber
Co-chair, Middle East Peace & Justice Action Committee

May 2021

On April 15, 2021, Representative Betty McCollum (D-Minn) introduced H.R. 2590: Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, building upon legislation she introduced previously to promote the human rights and safety of Palestinian children. Your help is needed now to get this important bill passed!

Israel has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states in article 37(a) that ‘‘no child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Yet “The Government of Israel and its military detains around 500 to 700 Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 17 each year and prosecutes them before a military court system that lacks basic and fundamental guarantees of due process in violation of international standards.” Some children are put under solitary confinement.

In the West Bank, there are 3 million inhabitants, and 45% are children under 18. Gaza is under a different jurisdiction and governed by Hamas.

This proposed legislation prohibits Israel from using U.S. taxpayer dollars in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem for: the military detention, abuse, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention; to support the seizure and destruction of Palestinian property and homes in violation of international humanitarian law; or, to extend any assistance or support for Israel’s unilateral annexation of Palestinian territory in violation of international humanitarian law.

Four Steps You Can Take to Help Palestinian Children

Here are four things you can do immediately to press for an end to the unjust and blatantly cruel mistreatment of children and families living under Israeli military occupation:

1. The first thing to do is to read the Bill. Here is the full text of bill H.R. 2590.

2. The second thing is to find out if your representative has co-signed the text. You can find a list of representatives that have already cosponsored the bill here.

• If YES: Thank him/her.
• If NO: Forward the text to them (find their email online through the Find Your Representative tool)
• Or call their office, inform them that you would like to request that they cosign and why (explain).

3. Make petitions for members of your branch and your community to sign then send a copy to your representative; try to get 50/100 people to sign. Use the list from the petition to build your branches by mailing those who signed flyers or emailing something about WILPF US

4. Schedule a Zoom appointment with your representative and make a Zoom group in which you can speak about your concern. If they have Jewish concerns, tell them that both Jewish Voice for Peace (700.000 strong, 70 chapters) and J Street are supporting this bill!

Thank you for caring and for doing the work!

Even with this conviction, #GeorgeFloyd is still dead.

The conviction on all three counts of murder may provide some “Painful earned justice,” yet what is done is irreversible.

Although we may hope this conviction leads to even more accountability, the fact remains that before this trial completed, another black life was killed in Minneapolis, #RIPDaunteWright.

In the United States, all people of color are regularly profiled, disrespected, inhumanly treated, beaten and murdered with impunity. Since the inception of this country, the pandemic of institutionalized racist violence has infected police departments in each community, with accountability being far too rare.

WILPF US calls on its members to support the movement to #DefundThePolice — shifting funds to peaceful human-services, affirming that #BlackLivesMatter. 

“All Lives” will never matter until “Black Lives Matter.”

#JusticeForGeorgeFloyd

Darien De Lu
President
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, US Section
 

Federal Reserve System symbol on hundred dollar bill / Shutterstock.com.

By Marybeth Gardam
Chair, Women, Money & Democracy Committee

April 2021

Talk to anyone about the Federal Reserve System and watch their eyes glaze over. Tell them we need to dismantle the Fed and democratize our money and they may write you off as a hopeless nutter.

But no, we’re not wearing tin foil hats when we share these ideas! More and more economists are agreeing that our money system is corrupt and built on oppressive debt that keeps us chained. The WILPF US Women, Money & Democracy Committee has been studying these realities and joining with allies on possible solutions.

How the Federal Reserve System Works

Most people believe that the Federal Reserve is a government agency that keeps all the money they print in a vault at Fort Knox, and when we borrow money or our banks do, that money gets somehow transferred to where it’s needed for investment, capital expense spending, or government program expenses (like all that pricey weaponry and unusable nuclear weapons we maintain at a cost of billions each year). It’s what we’ve been told since we were children. My dad worked for the Federal Reserve, and that’s what I thought they did!

Well, the truth is a lot more interesting, and as usual it’s important to ‘follow the money.’ But the money doesn’t lead to Fort Knox like you thought!

The Federal Reserve System is made up of twelve branch banks, the most powerful by far being the New York Federal Reserve. New York is also where all those wolves of Wall Street live and work, and where the New York Stock Exchange rules the economic world. Even though its presidential appointments help it to pose as a government entity, the Fed is independent, owned by the largest and most powerful transnational banks  and investment firms. (See also These Are the Banks that Own the New York Fed). Their interest is entirely in profits…theirs, not yours or our government’s.

While your dollar features signatures of the US Treasury Secretary, up top in small print it says: A Federal Reserve Note. So the US Treasury and the US Mint don’t issue ‘our money.’ ‘Our money’ is not stored at Fort Knox. Our money is created by a simple bank credit accounting keystroke that only happens when someone borrows money.

All those student loans, the mortgage on your house, the business loan that kept your employer competitive, or the insurance company that borrows against its policy payments to advertise…all those loans and trillions more create dollars more efficiently than the printers ever could. When you borrow money, it becomes a liability for you, but it is an asset for the financial corporation that made the loan to you. THAT is how the majority of our ‘currency’ comes into existence. No one works for it. But everyone pays for it.

Creative Solutions for Democratizing Our Money

The Alliance for Just Money (AJM) is campaigning hard to reform (“democratize”) our money system and they have some pretty creative ideas about how it might work.  Watch a short video called "A Solution to the Crisis - Just Money Now!" 

A lot of those ideas are gaining traction with major economists, including Joseph Huber and Michael Kumhof.     

The WILPF US Women, Money & Democracy Committee (W$D) has been studying the AJM materials and learning how money really is created out of thin air. The government creates money by borrowing from those ‘too-big-to-fail’ transnational banks, thanks to a law passed in 1913. These are the kind of entangling alliances and pay-to-play dynamics that are at work whenever our government decides to repeatedly bail out those big banks and investment bully boys. But is this really the way we want our government to work? Is it the way we want our money controlled?

If you are interested in learning more about the work of Women, Money & Democracy Committee, contact us to be invited to our monthly Zoom calls. We’re talking about policy and how it affects the lives of women like you and your families. Public banking is one solution we’re working on, but we’re also examining a lot more.

You can view some of the amazing hopeful solutions women are creating to counter the injustice of our current economic system by watching the recordings of the “Zooms of Our Own” webinars that W$D co-sponsors with An Economy of Our Own.

As chair of the W$D committee, I put it this way:

We’re trying to normalize the idea that money doesn’t have to be built on debt, and that money needn’t be scarce or so divisive.

I also want to stress how important these issues are for women. Women are at the heart of economics, but we often get left out of the decisions that most affect our lives and our financial futures. In W$D and working with An Economy of Our Own, we’re learning together how to make sense of it all, and what kinds of reforms could transform the economy into one where the things and values we care most about have real substantive value.

What could we do with $74B taken from the Pentagon’s budget? Graphic used with permission from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Cherrill Spencer
Coordinator of Resource Preparation Team for the Call for Peace Campaign
Nancy Price
Team Member

April 2021

WILPF US continues our Call for Peace Campaign which we described in February 2021 and March 2021 eNews articles. We promised you some resource guides on why we must reduce the United States’ bloated military budget and where that saved money could be used to benefit human need. Now we have four new guides for you with background information and actions that you can take.

Your First Action to Get the Money Moving!

Under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) process, every year both chambers of Congress begin early in the year to discuss the military budget and any differences must be reconciled before the final vote and the President signs the bill. Now they are already hard at work on Fiscal Year 2022. For this reason, our most efficient action to influence the amount of money projected to be spent on wars, military equipment, and weapons is through our congressional representatives.

Already groups of representatives and senators tried to get the Pentagon’s 2021 budget reduced by 10% by introducing amendments to the fiscal year 2021 NDAA. When these amendments came to a vote last July 2020, 23 Senators and 93 Representatives voted to cut the budget (not enough to pass the amendments). This level of support would have been unthinkable a few years ago – a testament to the power of the peace movement and grassroots advocacy. But we WILPFers need to do more!

A “House Defense Spending Reduction Caucus” emerged from this July 2020 effort, and we must get more US House representatives to join its 50 members (as of March 16, 2020) so the caucus will wield more influence. This attachment explains how to find out if your congressperson has already joined this caucus and what to do if they have not.

The caucus sent a letter to President Biden on March 16 and here are a few quotes from that letter, which you could use in corresponding with your congressperson or senators:

• “Our federal budget is a statement of our national values, and part of undoing the damage of the last four years is re-evaluating our spending priorities as a nation. That re-evaluation should begin with the Department of Defense. Hundreds of billions of dollars now directed to the military would have greater return if invested in diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research.
• We could cut the Pentagon budget by more than ten percent and still spend more than the next ten largest militaries combined.
• We must end the forever wars, heal our veterans, and re-orient towards a holistic conception of national security that centers public health, climate change, and human rights.”

On March 24, 2021, 26 peace-oriented organizations wrote to the chairs of the various US Senate and House Committees that develop the NDAA and listed 10 proposals that would create cost savings of $80 billion (about 10% of the NDAA). For example the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) stated that reducing the nuclear triad to a total of eight submarines, 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and 1,000 warheads would save $300 million in FY 2022 and $4.3 billion from FYs 2022-2025. See this March 24^th letter from Win Without War.

WILPF US’s goal is a 50% reduction in the Pentagon’s budget, which would be about $350 billion in its current FY 2021 budget. You will find how that could be achieved in our resource guide #9 below.

Four New Resource Guides to Help You

More resource guides have been prepared to provide you with hard data about the US Military Budget and what monies removed from it would be better spent on. We have a team of volunteers researching and writing more guides to inform and encourage you to take action on our Call for Peace themes from several points of view. Here are details and links to four new guides:

Guide #5: “Your Tax Dollars at Work in the Middle East “   

This is a guide to US military expenditures in the Middle East and North Africa region. You will be astounded by how many billions of your tax dollars go to supply expensive weapons to countries such as Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Learn what these dollars could accomplish if redirected toward constructive rather than destructive purposes and how you can work to accomplish this goal of moving the money. Read Guide #5 here.

Guide #8: “National Military Spending and Your Town”

This guide explains how to find out the dollar amount collected from your community’s taxpayers that is going into the US military and what it could have been otherwise spent on that benefits your town. This guide also shows you how to visibly share this information in your town. Read Guide #8 here.

Guide #9: “Moving money out of the military budget into programs to benefit poor people”

This guide uses the Moral Budget of the Poor People’s Campaign and their Jubilee Policy Platform to show how to move $350 billions from the military budget into programs benefitting the poor. Read Guide #9 here.

Guide #12: “Letters to Leaders and Resolutions about Treaties and Reducing the Military Budget”

This guide features examples of letters to be completed by WILPF members asking for reductions in military spending, support for pertinent federal bills, and adherence to arms control treaties, to be sent to the US President, the US Secretary of Defense, all members of our US Congress, and state legislators. It also includes sample resolutions for city councils to pass calling for support of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and reductions in the so-called defense budget. Read Guide #12 here.

Guides 6,7,10, and 11 are still being prepared and will be issued later. Many thanks to our hard-working Call for Peace resource preparation team who have done the research and writing to create these resource guides.

Global Days of Action on Military Spending (GDAMS)

Through using these resource guides to generate our actions over the next two months, WILPF US will take part in the Global Days of Action on Military Spending (GDAMS), a worldwide campaign started in 2011 with the goal to raise awareness and change the discourse regarding military spending, as a means to achieve major reductions of military expenditures in 35 countries.

The highlight of this year’s campaign takes place on Monday, April 26 when the STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE (SIPRI) issues its annual yearbook on military spending in most countries in the world. SIPRI is an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control, and disarmament. Established in 1966, SIPRI provides data, analysis, and recommendations based on open sources. The GDAMS organizers will read this very detailed 2021 yearbook and provide analyses and commentary for WILPF and partner organizations to hold press conferences and carry out a Twitter storm on April 26. We will send an eAlert out when this commentary is available.

Here are lots of hashtags we can choose from whenever we tweet about moving money from military budgets:

#MoveTheMoney #Demilitarize #GDAMS #GCOMS #HealthcareNotWarfare #MilitarySpendingCostsUsTheEarth #DivestFromWar #PeaceNotWar #WelfareNotWarfare #FundPeaceNotWar #CutMilex #BuildPeaceNotWalls #FundHumanNeeds #StopTheWarOnLife

Here is the GDAMS 2021 website full of actions occurring around the world during the GDAMS.

You can find a US in-person action near you to attend or organize one in your hometown and add it to the worldwide map of actions.