by David Swanson

The Connecticut legislature has sent to the governor to sign a bill that would create a commission to develop a plan for, among other things:  ”the diversification or conversion of defense-related industries with an emphasis on encouraging environmentally-sustainable and civilian product manufacturing. On or before December 1, 2014, the commission shall submit such report to the Governor and, in accordance with the provisions of section 11-4a, to the joint standing committee of the General Assembly having cognizance of matters relating to commerce.”

The commission “shall Advise the General Assembly and the Department of Economic and Community Development on issues relating to the diversification or conversion of defense-related industries,” among other things. Read the full text.

According to Peace Action, sponsor State Senator Toni N. Harp from New Haven has said: “The proposed Futures Commission will set up a framework that allows us to convert many of our military related jobs and infrastructure into non-military industries.”

This is a remarkable breakthrough that didn’t just come out of nowhere:

“In November 2012, a ballot referendum passed in New Haven that called for moving the money from war to jobs rebuilding our infrastructure and human needs. This referendum won support nearly 6 to 1! This winter in Connecticut, the US Peace Council, No Nukes No War, the City of New Haven Peace Commission with the support of the state AFL-CIO and International Association of Machinists worked to get  SB619 introduced in the state legislature calling for a Futures Commission whose goals is to investigate how to convert the weapons manufacturing industries to producing civilian, green products and retain and develop manufacturing in the state. The Commission that this bill creates will include representatives of labor, peace and environmental organizations.”

In February, Bill Shortell, an official with the International Association of Machinists in Connecticut, explained what’s needed this way:

“Diverse forces are now converging in an attempt to carve up the military budget. These are (1) those who would cut it to reduce the deficit. There is considerable logic on their side. The solvency of the nation, in many people’s eyes, is threatened by the size of the debt compared with our GDP. About 30% of our government runs on borrowed cash. The same proportion can be applied to the military budget.

“Then there is growing group (2) that wants to “Move the Money” to much-needed social services, like health and education, and also to repair our crumbling infrastructure.

“There is also a powerful group (3) who would not reduce the military budget at all. This group somehow imagines the continued military usefulness of fighter jets, nuclear subs, etc, even though they rarely argue this. They instead generally justify continued military spending because of the millions of jobs and billions in profits that it creates.

“TIME FOR CONVERSION

“Finally, there is a small group (4), which sees the dismantling of the military budget as inevitable, and is making plans for alternative uses of the “procurement” part of the budget. This is about $100 billion of the $700 billion budget. We advocate re-assigning workers and switching capital to products, which have a peacetime use. This does NOT mean abandoning factories and retraining manufacturing workers to be nurses, teachers, and construction workers.

“We don’t need any more construction workers right now, and most military manufacturing workers are not suited or inclined to training in the social services. In addition, folding up this significant sector of US manufacturing, with no replacement products would have a disastrous impact on the US economy.

“Economic Conversion means designing peacetime manufactured products that are in demand, and re-tooling military facilities to produce them. The growing market for green technology is most often cited.

“The two other groups who would cut the military budget seem unaware of the impact of eliminating so much value-adding industry.  Nor are they focused on the plight of the military production workers or the many millions more, soldiers, administrators, security personnel, who stand to lose their job with the shrinking of the military budget. These last, however,  are not represented by unions.

“Union-based organizations like USLAW and LLP have no choice but to take into account the ideas of Economic Conversion, as we set policies and phrase our peace message. Calling flatly to “cut the military budget,”  spurs opposition from the manufacturing unions. These, in turn, have enough influence in the AFL-CIO to considerably weaken its vital input in the struggle over the reduction of the military budget.

“Economic Conversion is a difficult, complex question. There is little precedent for using government funds to manufacture anything but weapons. But if we don’t try to understand it and embrace it, the likelihood of achieving other benefits of the peace dividend fades, as the military workers and our unions cling to militarism.

“The military budget is so enormous that the goals of all three of the groups who would reduce it can be addressed. To fully achieve them, we need new taxes on people who can afford to pay.”

by Laura L. Finley

Breaking News: In Florida, a murderer has made public his plans to kill three individuals in the next six weeks. If all goes according to his plan, Elmer Carroll will die on May 29th, William Van Poyk will die on June 12th, and Marshal Gore will die on June 24th. And what is more, this murderer has admitted that he has killed before; in fact, he killed three people in 2012 alone.  Clearly this man is a serial killer who has killed and plans to keep doing so.

If this perpetrator were an average person like us, these highly publicized murder plans would be the subject of mass public outrage and the focus of tremendous law enforcement attention. A manhunt would be under way to catch the “evildoer.” Once apprehended, prosecutors would spare nothing to win the case and see this bloodthirsty felon held accountable for his crimes.

But, of course, the perpetrator is not like us. He is Florida Governor Rick Scott, and he has vowed to deplete Florida’s death row as quickly as possible. He has repeatedly demonstrated that he plans to continue the state’s heinously flawed death penalty system in the coming months and for the indefinite future.  And thus little public outcry, no “manhunt” for this man who will easily murder more people than did the Boston marathon attackers.  Instead, the state continues to make it easy for Rick Scott to kill and kill some more.

Florida is already the only state that allows a jury to assign a death sentence without a unanimous decision. A 7-5 vote can put a man on death row in the Wild West that is Florida’s death penalty. Some 406 inmates sit on that death row awaiting Scott’s decision when to kill them. This is more than any state except California. In the last two years, Florida, under Scott’s leadership, has led the nation in the number of new death sentences.  Florida also leads the nation with the number of death row exonerees, having found 24 people it sent to death row actually did not actually commit the offense for which they were convicted.

Not content with the ease with which Scott gets the go ahead to kill, the Florida legislature recently passed the Timely Justice Act. George Orwell would be so proud, for there is no justice in this Act and time works against justice. Instead, if Scott signs it into law, it will limit appeals for each person who has received a death sentence. It requires the Governor to sign their Death Warrants within 30 days after appeals are exhausted and clemency is denied, and it demands that executions take place within 180 days of the signing of the death warrant. This would impact 13 prisoners currently, and another 80 have exhausted appeals and are awaiting clemency hearings. This legislation will almost certainly lead to the execution of innocent individuals in the state of Florida, as most of the 24 exonerees had been on death row for more than 15 years before they were released.  And, while these innocent men languish in the prison at Starke, the real murderers carry on. And those who were responsible for the flaws—the police who elicit false confessions from mentally ill or low IQ inmates, the prosecutors whose misconduct has been repeatedly deemed egregious—they remain, like Rick Scott, in the free world doing as they please.

Even if Governor Scott does not sign the Timely Justice Act, however, he has vowed to speed up executions in Florida by executing an individual every two weeks. So, while six states in the last six years have abolished the death penalty, Florida wants Rick Scott to keep on killing.

I don’t think this is OK. And I hope others do not, either. If you are outraged that Florida’s serial killer Rick Scott and his legislative toadies are able to distort justice in these ways, take action. Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP), Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., and other groups are pushing Scott to veto the Timely Justice Act and are actively organizing to move Florida in the direction of the other 18 states that now do not kill offenders to teach them the errors of their ways. I implore you to contact Rick Scott and to get involved with FADP’s efforts.  Otherwise, we are simply turning our heads while a murderer remains free to kill again.

Laura L. Finley, Ph.D., teaches in the Barry University Department of Sociology & Criminology and is syndicated by PeaceVoice.

by Robert C. Koehler

Let’s all work together to stop terrorism!

The Palm Beach County, Fla. Sheriff’s Office has a new video out urging local citizens to call them if something smells bad or seems a little weird, like, oh, a tourist is taking a picture of a bridge but there’s no one in the foreground — no spouse, no grinning kids, just . . . a bridge.

If it seems suspicious, call — because, I guess, if everyone is vigilant (“Hello, I want to report two young men carrying backpacks”) and we work with the authorities, America will be safe as pie in no time.

This program is called Community Partners Against Terrorism, though I’m tempted to call it know-nothing security — the kind based on stereotypes, unexamined fears, self-righteousness, external projections and an us-vs.-them social organization. Terrorists are bad people with inscrutable motives. All we need to know is that they’re out to get us. This is the message of the terrorism “experts,” who leverage their authority from their ability to keep us scared and vigilant.

Security is a real need, of course, but know-nothing security flaunts that need, often enough both ignoring and aggravating the real dangers we face while, at the same time, inflicting massive inconvenience on people innocently caught in its web, i.e., those on the wrong side of our society’s color and ethnicity divide.

For instance, when I read about the CPAT initiative, I thought about an incident 11 years ago that garnered its 15 minutes of national attention and neatly encapsulated all the problems with know-nothing security.

On Sept. 12, 2002 — a day after the one-year anniversary of 9/11 — three young med students were on their way to Miami, where they were going to begin an internship at a local hospital. They stopped at a Shoney’s restaurant in Calhoun, Ga. A local woman sitting nearby thought she heard them plot a terrorist attack. “We’ll bring it down,” one of them apparently said. He was referring to his car, but no matter.

The young med students were American citizens, but they were also Muslims. She called the police.

The three were detained, their car and motel room searched; a 20-mile stretch of local highway was shut down for an entire day — and, well, nothing incriminating was found. They were medical students, after all. They were released, they did some interviews, life went back to normal. Except it didn’t.

What happened next was no more than an ironic footnote to the initial news spasm. As CNN reported at the time: “Since Friday, the hospital has asked the students to transfer somewhere else after receiving numerous threats. Hospital president Dr. Jack Michel said Saturday his hospital has received an overwhelming number of e-mails and phone calls that he described as ‘threatening, ethnic, racial e-mails directed at Muslim-Americans.’”

Can somebody please tell me where the terrorist threat is in this story?

America’s know-nothing security team — community and police in partnership against terrorism — succeeded in thwarting the non-threat of three Muslim students driving through Georgia, but completely failed to notice or be concerned about, and perhaps even participated in, actual threats of violence against, good God, a hospital. This part wasn’t even a news story in itself, just a “bigots will be bigots” addendum, quickly forgotten, as America went back to scanning the horizon for enemies plotting mayhem against its way of life.

The essence of know-nothing security is absolute indifference to, and ignorance of, the inner life of “them” — the terrorists, criminals and bad people we fear and watch out for. The entirety of the strategy is to spot and interrupt unlawful activity in progress, hopefully before the bomb goes off. To get there ahead of the blast, it’s necessary to engage in widespread racial profiling and harassment: to stalk “them” on a routine basis, no matter the mayhem it inflicts on their lives.

A young, African-American friend who lives in my Chicago neighborhood described something that happened to him the other day: He had just left his mother’s restaurant, realized it was colder outside than he had thought and turned around to go back and get his jacket. A police officer had been watching him the whole time. When the young man changed directions, that was “suspicious.” He was stopped, frisked, spread-eagled against the police car, etc. Eventually the officer let him go. This was routine.

We invest multi-billions of dollars in know-nothing security and, in the process, foment anger, hatred and, occasionally, counter-violence. If true security were the point, we’d invest far more effort and money in real violence-prevention programs, such as CeaseFire and the growing restorative justice movement, not to mention job-creation.

Instead, we create enemies and wage perpetual war against them. This is an absolute mindset, exemplified by the U.S. military’s standard operating procedure for dealing with the hunger strike at Guantanamo, as recently revealed by Al Jazeera. Common Dreams reports that “the military’s guidelines were especially troubling because doctors and nurses are reminded that they are ‘adjuncts of the security apparatus’ and not authorized to ‘act independently’ in their duties as health professionals.”

Security rules, and no one is safe.

Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer, and a Contributing Author for New Clear Vision. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com, visit his website at commonwonders.com, or listen to him at Voices of Peace radio.