NEWS

Dear WILPF Member or Friend,

One of our younger members recently put WILPF’s situation in the 21st Century into powerful words. She said:

“Those who oppose human rights and peace will always have funds to invest in violence and war. But organizations like WILPF will always have to seek funding for peace work and human rights advocacy”.

Of course it echoes the 1970s refrain about how nice it would be if Peacemakers had a huge budget to depend on and the Defense Department had to hold bake sales to buy more war planes.

Not much has changed since the 70s on that equation, except that funding for peace and justice organizations has gotten tighter and harder to find. And the issues WILPF members engage are more complex and challenging than ever.

With so many issues and so many challenges, we rely on you more than ever to show your support for our mission, program and the work that keeps us so  engaged.

We are introducing this Mini-Newsletter to keep you abreast of many of the details you might not have gotten from the Internet, our website, our EAlerts or ENewsletters. We encourage you to read those postings, open our email, forward and share information about our programs, our branches and our challenges. You’ll also find out about our successes, our newest Board Members, our latest recruiting successes, our goals for fundraising and staying strong at wilpfus.org.

Printing and mailing more hard copy updates is expensive, so we’re asking you TODAY to consider a meaningful gift that helps defray our costs and expand funds for program and branch support.

• If you were moved by the potential for training and recruiting new leaders in our Practicum and CSW story
• If you continue to be inspired by the energy and raw courage of our DISARM leaders
• If you are as delighted as we are at the return on investment our MiniGrant Program is getting

BEFORE MAY 30^th —Now is the time to dig in and contribute to expand theCraigslist “Pop-Up Donation” Challenge! If just 100 of us give $100, we’ll reach our goal by Memorial Day, a fitting deadline for peace organizing.

But ANY amount will help meet our goal.

I am humbled by your support in reelecting me as your President. We have a lot to do together!

Let’s stand united for ONE WILPF!

In Peace

Mary Hanson Harrison
President
WILPF US
 

PS. Don’t miss being counted in! If you have not renewed your membership, you might not get all our publications. Contact info@wilpfus.org with questions about your renewal date!

PPS. Click here to read my full text of my letter send to all WILPF members this spring.

By Odile Hugonot Haber
odilehh@gmail.com

WILPF branches around the country will join in Days of Action from April 15 to 18 as part of a worldwide protest against military expenditures. Weapons will not fix climate change; we need urgently to change our national priorities.

Joan Brannigan reports that the St. Louis Branch will demonstrate and hand out the War Resisters League pie chart during the lunch hour in the county seat on April 15, The Raging Grannies and Greater Philadelphia Branch will distribute the WILPF Great Day posters. San Jose CA branch joins the Friday Peace Vigil to sing and hand out fliers.

April 15 is usually tax day and a large portion of our taxes goes to military spending. This year the 18th is Tax Day in the USA, a traditional moment in the calendar for civil society to challenge how the public money is used.

The United States federal government expects to spend $3.8 trillion dollars in 2015 – that sounds like a lot of money, and it is. That’s about $12,000 for each woman, man and child living in the United States. It’s also about 21 percent of the entire United States economy. Our government bombs Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, develops our US drone program by leaps and bounds.
 
While we lay water pipes and build road in Iraq or Afghanistan, our water pipes here in the US are crumbling and we need to rebuild our infrastructure at home. We need to convert our economy.

“Budgets are moral documents” and “The national budget represents the resources of the people of United States.”(The Women’s Budget by Jane Midgley)

Global action on military expenditures

“We are writing to encourage you to join activists across the US and internationally in this year’s Global Days of Action on Military Spending (GDAMS). The protests are timed to coincide with release of the annual world military expenditure figures by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The Pentagon has inflated its budget request to nearly $600 billion, including $58.8 billion for its “overseas contingency operations” – wars - and to quadruple spending for war preparations in Eastern Europe. In the coming years, our government is planning to spend $1,000,000,000,000 to modernize its nuclear arsenal and its delivery systems, a small fraction of which could bring on nuclear winter. The new F-35 fighter/bombers are set to cost $1,500,000,000,000 over their “lifetime.”

In addition to encouraging and fueling the catastrophic destruction of wars, this spending claims and truncates lives without a shot being fired, a bomb dropped or a missile launched.

Global military spending has surged to an all-time high of more than $1.75 trillion. Given the numerous needs and crises in the US and internationally – water that’s not poisoned, reversing and coping with climate change, the basics of food, housing, education and medical care – it is clear that our, and many other nations’, national budget priorities are seriously wrong and dangerous.” (From Joseph Gershon AFSC)

Call your Congressional representative.
 

Some links

WILPF International, Reaching Critical Will 
Oppose nuclear weapons modernization
Global Campaign on Military Spending

Where are your tax dollars going?
Friends Committee on National Legislation

National Priorities Project 

Photo: Miners’ Canaries Harold One Feather, Charmaine White Face and Leona Morgan spoke before Physicians for Social Responsibility, in Washington, DC, Jan 27, 2016.

WILPF has been involved with the campaign for a moratorium on uranium mining  at least since Ellen Thomas first met Charmaine Whiteface at the Chicago conference in December 2012 on "A mountain of nuclear waste 70 years high" in the Great Lakes area. Unfortunately, although we have indexes of eAlerts and eNews that go back into 2007s, most of the actual documents have by now disappeared.

By March 2013, the second anniversary of the continuing Fukushima disaster, WILPF helped bring Charmaine to join a Buddhist-led walk through New York to Washington DC.  Hattie Nestel and perhaps a half dozen WILPFers also participated. Charmaine enriched the walk along the way, meeting with many city officials and arousing their own concerns about the radioactive particles now spreading throughout the USA from thousands of abandoned mines for which no agency or mining firms took responsibility. WILPFer Pat Birnie helped get Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Progressive Caucus and very familiar with Pat's Tucson Branch, to agree to introduce their bill (which he hasn't done yet!) and Crystal Zevon (Montpelier Branch) began videotaping Charmaine's projects. The best source of information on this remarkable venture with its continuing frustrations and creative responses is Charmaine's own website, defend blackhills.org.

Crystal Zevon has posted a video of the visit to DC on YouTube.

The ‘Miners Canaries’ in Washington, DC, Jan. 2016
By Charmaine White Face, Defenders of the  Black Hills

A contingent of Native Americans from the Northern Great Plains and the Southwest United States traveled to Washington, DC, on Jan. 25-29, 2016, as “The Miners' Canaries” to warn the entire country about the peril from “home grown” radioactive pollution.

This “home grown” pollution is the pollution from natural sources like coal and uranium and is polluting both the water and the air. This was the message that was given over and over in presentations to doctors, health researchers, politicians, college students, federal agencies, the public, and the media. 

In the early days of coal mining in England, the miners would take small birds (yellow canaries) down into the mines in small cages because the coal emits dangerous gases.  When the birds passed out or died, the miners knew they had to leave the coal mine otherwise they would die as well from breathing in the invisible gases.

Native American people from the Sioux, Navajo, and Pueblo nations, including others, are now the “miner's canary” for the whole country due to home grown radioactive pollution.  Native American people have been on the front lines of receiving radioactive pollution from uranium mining, and the Four Corners area in the Southwest along with the 1868 Treaty Territory in the Northern Great Plains were designated “National Sacrifice Areas” in the Nixon administration in the early 1970s.  This effort was aimed at the two largest Native American nations:  the Navajo and the Sioux.  For both of these nations, these are considered acts of genocide, or chemical warfare, which is continuing to today.

From studies by the Indian Health Service, the Native American people of the Northern Great Plains have the highest rate of cancer in the country.  Not only are the Sioux people subjected to radioactive pollution from more than 2,000 abandoned uranium mines but also from some of the largest, open-pit, coal mines in the country, coal that is laced with radioactive particles.  However, the US Environmental Protection Agency does not monitor or regulate radioactive particles in coal dust.   In addition, the coal is burned in many coal-fired power plants in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota.  The smoke contains radioactive particles.  Again, the US Environmental Protection Agency does not monitor or regulate radioactive particles in coal smoke.

In the fall of 2015, the EPA finally began regulating and monitoring coal ash; this is the portion left after the coal has been mined and burned.  EPA finally decided that there were radioactive particles in coal ash.  However, by not starting at the beginning with the coal mining, there needs to be an amendment to the Clean Air Act that prohibits radioactive particles being released in coal dust and coal smoke.  The coal is shipped by train to both East and West Coasts, so it is not just the Northern Great Plains that is being affected.  Millions of people on both coasts are breathing in radioactive particles from coal smoke.  The biggest coal fired power plant in the country is in Georgia and gets its coal from Wyoming. No matter which way the winds blow, millions of people will be breathing in radioactive particles from this one power plant.  

The presentations in DC then talked about water.  It was amazing that the Flint, MI, water problems were also receiving media attention at the same time.  Water in Native American communities in both the Southwest and the Northern Great Plains has been contaminated with radioactive pollution for years, but no national media attention has ever been given to this deadly pollution. 

It was also pointed out that the EPA only monitors and regulates a handful of radioactive particles in water and very few, if any, natural radioactive decay products of naturally occurring uranium.  So a municipal water department will say they are within EPA guidelines and it will be true.  But the water is contaminated with many other kinds of radioactive particles that the EPA does NOT monitor or regulate.  This means that the Clean Water Act also needs to be amended to include ALL radioactive particles.

In frustration with the EPA, the group also conducted a protest in front of the EPA office.  They also met with many officials from the EPA again bringing this important information to the EPA's attention. 

The national campaign, Clean Up the Mines, which advocates for the cleanup of the 15,000 plus abandoned uranium mines in the United States, was also part of the delegation. The entire group is hopeful that the passage of the Uranium Exploration and Mining Accountability Act, aimed at cleaning up all the abandoned uranium mines, will help not just their own communities and nations but also help all the people of the United States who are constantly being exposed to radioactive pollution without their knowledge.

Please join the efforts to stop “home grown radioactive pollution” from continuing to affect the United States.  Amendments to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts need to be written, and passed by the Congress.  The Uranium Exploration and Mining Accountability Act is already written but needs to be introduced and passed.  For more information contact Charmaine White Face at bhdefenders@msn.com

By Carol Urner and Ellen Thomas for the Disarm/End Wars Issue Committee

The second Nuclear Free Future (NFF) Tour began April 1 and should end May 15.

By mid-May we expect to be too exhausted to continue this new tour into the Southeastern states, up the East Coast and into the Midwest. 

We are still accepting invitations, although we already have enough to make this second NFF tour as valuable as the first.  Contact Ellen Thomas by email with your questions and/or to issue an invitation to stop by.  In our January/February NFF tour it was good to break long drives with shorter but precious visits to listen and share with WILPFers and others over coffee, tea or a tall glass of water.

We will be stopping in DC for the week of April 15-23, primarily to meet with the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA) to educate Representatives, key Senators and the Administration on current nuclear issues.  At least five of our Disarm/End Wars Committee members expect to be there to deliver personal letters from our Branch members to their Representatives. Scroll down for useful information and resources if you are interested in joining us this year or next.

A preliminary report of our first tour appeared in the March WILPF e-news. Ellen is now working on a much more detailed report of what we felt was a successful start to what we hope can be a significant WILPF boost to much needed nuclear abolition movement building NOW.  We were able to meet with almost everyone who requested visits on the first tour, and also with some other individuals not included in our preliminary reporting.

For this second tour we have already received invitations from Triangle Branch in Chapel Hill NC (for April 13) and are considering four others in this same area. We have invitations from Baltimore Branch and a UFPJ group also there.  We look forward to visiting with Greater Philadelphia and Pittsburgh Branches in Pennsylvania, with Pacem in Terris in Wilmington DE, and with New York Metro Branch. We would love to meet with Cape Cod and Montpelier Branches, which have also invited us, if the scheduling works. If it does perhaps we could accept the request that we revisit Boston, which would greatly please us.

We also have invitations we hope we can arrange for from Detroit and Ann Arbor, Minneapolis/St Paul, and St Louis Branches in the Midwest.  If possible we would love to accept the invitation from Physicians for Social Responsibility in Kansas City MO.  Again, others can still invite us, but those listed here will of course have priority if the scheduling can be arranged.

It would be great to meet with you anywhere on our second Nuclear Free Future Tour. It will also be great if we can all work together through this year and the next to build the better societies we seek, to develop nonviolent ways to solve our many problems, and to save our planet home from becoming another Mars as well.

It is not too late to register for ANA DC Days, April 17-20 and Spring Meeting, April 21-22, or to send letters for us to deliver to your own Representative. Send email to Ellen Thomas, or call 202-210-3886, with questions and for additional information.

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday you can join us in promotion of Eleanor Holmes Norton’s HR 1976,  the only bill in Congress that supports Bernie Sanders’ call for global abolition of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power. 

You can also spend Thursday and Friday at the annual ANA spring planning conference, where we will all be able to contribute from our own experiences while lobbying or in our own communities, as well.  If you are able to stay for the spring planning retreat on Thursday and Friday it will cost only $75.00 additional, payable to ANA on arrival, and including light breakfast and lunches.

If you register directly with ANA please let Ellen Thomas know.  As late registrants, even WILPFers will be responsible for their own housing and transportation, but ANA has many suggestions for places to stay.

 To get the most out of the experience you should be there the whole day  Sunday 4/17 for the “lobby training” (though in WILPF we don’t think of it as lobbying so much as educating Congress and also listening and learning valuable information from them).

A super majority of the world’s national governments and people are ready now for the Prague promises President Obama once made to us, and in our own lifetimes, as soon as possible. The human race, and possibly most or all life on earth, is arguably more seriously in danger of extinction now than at any time during the so called Cold War.  Yet, there is still a little time, and thanks to the internet, a lot more information for us to work with.

We look forward to sharing with you and others the GOOD news that progress is being made both at home and around the world.