Friday, December 07, 2018

Tell Congress to Save This Vital Nuclear Treaty.

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President Trump has announced plans to withdraw the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a key nuclear disarmament pact with Russia signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and approved by the U.S. Senate. 

Congress should take action to keep the United States in the treaty. And either house of Congress alone has the power to refuse to fund any weapons prohibited by the treaty.

Click here to email your Representative and your two Senators.

Some members of Congress are already indicating an interest in taking action.

Congressman Ro Khanna has tweeted: "I am alarmed that President Trump is withdrawing from the INF treaty with Russia. This action plunges us back into a nuclear arms race and endangers our troops, allies, & the world, while wasting taxpayer dollars to prepare for a nuclear war that must never be fought."

The INF prohibits the United States and Russia from deploying both nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges between 310 and 3,420 miles. These are among the weapons most likely to lead to miscalculation or misadventure in a crisis.

Following ratification of the INF, the United States destroyed almost 1,000 missiles, and the Soviet Union almost 2,000. "But," writes Jon Schwarz at The Intercept, "arms control treaties are never about weapons and numbers alone. They can help enemy nations create virtuous circles, both between them and within themselves. Verification requires constant communication and the establishment of trust; it creates constituencies for peace inside governments and in the general public; this reduces on both sides the power of the paranoid, reactionary wing that exists in every country; this creates space for further progress; and so on."

Conversely, withdrawal from arms control treaties can feed vicious cycles of distrust, animosity, and militarization.

Click here to stop this disaster in its tracks.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which now shows the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight, points out: "The INF withdrawal is part of a pattern. It is not the first nuclear treaty the U.S. has terminated; at the end of 2001 the United States walked out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty it had signed with the Soviet Union in 1972."

Both the United States and Russia currently accuse each other of violating the INF Treaty. Wherever the truth lies, the solution is not to pull out of the treaty, but to redouble diplomatic efforts to resolve the allegations.

The United States and Russia control more than 90 percent of the world’s nearly 15,000 nuclear weapons. It is unlikely that any of the other nuclear-armed powers will be willing to engage in negotiations to control or eliminate these extraordinarily dangerous armaments if the United States abandons arms control.

A ratified treaty is a part of the “supreme law of the land,” former Senator Russell Feingold has noted — “which should logically mean that it could only be undone by Congress and the President, or at least by a vote of the Senate.”

Tell the first branch of government in the U.S. Constitution to step up and do its job.

After signing the petition, please use the tools on the next webpage to share it with your friends.

This work is only possible with your financial support. Please chip in $3 now. 



-- The RootsAction.org Team

P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.

Background:
>> David Cortright, The Nation: “The Peace Movement Won the INF Treaty. We Must Fight to Preserve It.”
>> Russell Feingold, NBCnews.com: “Donald Trump can unilaterally withdraw from treaties because Congress abdicated responsibility”
>> Zia Mian, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “The INF Treaty and the crises of arms control”
>> Jon Schwarz, The Intercept: “What Trump and John Bolton Don’t Understand About Nuclear War”
>> Ira Helfand, CNN.com: “Sheer Luck Has Helped Us Avoid Nuclear War So Far – Now We Need to Take Action”
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Must-read Washington Post Op/Ed on #MeToo Movement: Fair Food Program “could do incalculable good if adopted more widely”…

Coalition of Immokalee Workers<workers@ciw-online.org>
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… A formal model of worker-driven collaboration with consumers could do incalculable good if adopted more widely. The Fair Food Program, launched in 2011 in the tomato fields of Florida by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, targets degrading work conditions, including brutal sexual abuse. (Some studies have found that 80 percent of female farmworkers have faced harassment, including rape and other assault.) It enlists the consumers of big agriculture — namely, the fast-food restaurants and supermarket chains that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Florida tomatoes every year, such as Taco Bell, Whole Foods and Walmart — as enforcers against such abuses. The buyers pledge to pull their business from farms that violate a worker-authored code of conduct, and the workers themselves are the monitors. An independent body conducts investigations and unannounced audits of participating farms, with 80 percent of complaints resolved in less than a month. The consequences of violations are swift and strict: Harassers are fired and temporarily banned from reemployment at participating farms, while growers that fall consistently short face probation or suspension from the program.

The results are stunning...

Read highlights from the Washington Post 's Op/Ed on the #MeToo Movement and the Fair Food Program!
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Let's End the War on Yemen! GRAPHIC: Sign here button Share this action on Facebook Share this action on Twitter Please donate 3 dollars The U.S. Senate voted last week to advance for further action a bill to end U.S. participation in the horrific war on Yemen.

RootsAction Team<info@rootsaction.org>
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The U.S. Senate voted last week to advance for further action a bill to end U.S. participation in the horrific war on Yemen. Although the bill includes a loophole, amendments can still be offered, the House must also pass it, Trump has threatened a veto, and compliance would have to be enforced, this remains a hugely important opportunity.

There's a reason that Trump has threatened a veto. There's a reason that Secretaries Mattis and Pompeo rushed over to the Senate to urge a "No" vote behind closed doors despite apparently having nothing persuasive to offer. The reason is that if Congress ends a war, Congress could end many other wars.

Help set just that precedent by clicking here to email your two Senators and your Representative!

Saudi Arabia's murder of one journalist is horrific. Its murder, in collaboration with the U.S. military, of thousands of men, women, and children by the busload in Yemen is, according to the United Nations and the European Union, currently the greatest human catastrophe on earth.

Click here to email Congress this message:

The war that is destroying Yemen and threatening the death by starvation of millions of children is dependent on both the participation of the U.S. military (picking targets and refueling bombers) and U.S. weapons sold to Saudi Arabia. As a constituent, I insist that you must do the only decent thing and support legislation to end U.S. participation in the war (S.J.Res. 54 and H.Con.Res.138) and to block any further weapons sales from the United States to the Saudi government. Please speak out publicly and lobby your colleagues. There are many lives in the balance.

We can build on the current momentum and move Congress to end the war and to end weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. Click here to quickly email your Representative and Senators.

Back in March, Defense Secretary James Mattis claimed that the U.S. pulling out of the war would create more civilian deaths, rather than fewer. No Senator or Representative should be permitted to treat such nonsense as anything other than nonsense after these past eight months of killing.

Click here to make your voice heard.

After doing this action, please use the tools on the next webpage to share it with your friends.

This work is only possible with your financial support. Please chip in $3 now. 



-- The RootsAction.org Team

P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.

Background:
> H.Con.Res.138 Text and Cosponsors
> Sanders to Bring Back War Powers Resolution to End Unauthorized U.S. Military Involvement in Yemen
> David Swanson: Why 55 U.S. Senators Voted for Genocide in Yemen (Includes roll call of March 2018 vote)
> Shireen Al-Adeimi: Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance has accomplished what 50,000 Yemeni deaths could not

 
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Climate change requires we convert the U.S. war machine now!

Global Network<globalnet@mindspring.com>
To  Global Network  

Climate change requires we convert the U.S. war machine now!


Banner made by artist Russell Wray from Hancock, Maine

This is the message we will be carrying to Bath Iron Works (BIW) during the next Navy destroyer 'christening' protest.  (We don't know the date of that event yet.)

At this point 53 people from across Maine and the US have signed up to commit non-violent civil disobedience outside the shipyard during the ceremony.  Others will be there at the protest to hold signs and banners like the one above calling for the conversion of the shipyard to build sustainable technologies so that we can give the future generations a real chance to live on our Mother Earth.

Sadly I must admit that some environmental groups are very reluctant to recognize the cold hard facts that the Pentagon has the largest carbon boot print of any single institution on the planet.  We cannot effectively deal with the ravages of climate change by ignoring the colossus in the middle of the tea shop.

Over the years we have heard some say that while they agree that BIW must be converted if we wish to deal with climate change they fear going public with that demand because they are timid about angering the workers at BIW.  They say they don't want to negatively impact jobs.

OK fair enough.  Of course we all want the workers at BIW (and at any other military industrial facility) to keep their jobs.  In fact Brown University in Rhode Island has done the definitive study on just this point and they have found that conversion to building sustainable technology creates more job.  Let me repeat - the transition from building war machines to sustainable production creates more jobs.  See the Brown studyhere. 

Once we share that information you'd think that the reluctant environmental activists would say 'OK that makes great sense.  Let's do it."  But most still remain timid.  Why?

I can only speculate but I've come to the conclusion that many (not all) enviros are really afraid to confront the #1 mythology of America that says we are the 'exceptional nation' - that America deserves to rule the global roost and that anyone who questions that military mythology is unpatriotic and potentially a 'red'.  So they become frozen by the worn out notion that if you don't stay silent about the war machine you must be a commie pinko type.

At this point it becomes instructive to look back to the controversial days in America when we had that other deep evil economic institution called slavery. Many were opposed to that system of production but they were afraid to directly confront it because they wanted to stay away from arguing with their friends and neighbors and wanted to be liked more than they wanted to see real change happen.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass met many people like that during his day and this is what he said to them: 

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a …
So the lesson here is that if we are truly serious about protecting the future generations (if that is still even possible) then we have to give up timidity - we have to non-violently confront the institutions blocking serious progress on dealing with climate change - and we can't keep ignoring the massive impact that the US military empire and war machine has in creating this current calamity!

In simpler words - it's time to get real - to fish or cut bait - to shit or get off the pot.  Take your pick.

Time is running out.
 
Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org 
http://space4peace.blogspot.com  (blog)

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. - Henry David Thoreau 
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