From Draft NOtices, July-September 2016
Call issued by: womyn in COMD and Project YANO, Mujeres en Resistencia, San Diego City College Visionary Feminists Club, Mujeres de Maiz
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This flier is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (http://www.comdsd.org/).
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)
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Five Insights from FOIA Documents on Military Recruiting in Schools
From Draft NOtices, July-September 2016
— Seth Kershner
What’s the military footprint in your school district? How do you know? If we had access to hard data like the number of recruiter visits, wouldn’t it be easier to make the case for reform?
Over the past two or three years I have been filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the various recruiting services. I’ve received more than 2,000 pages of material so far, detailing the extent of school recruiting activities in all of New York state and Connecticut, as well as parts of California, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
In the hopes of beginning a broader conversation about using the FOIA to support counter-recruitment campaigns, in this article I outline the five things that Draft NOtices readers may find most compelling about the data.
It’s worse than we thought. The data tell an alarming story about unregulated military recruiter access to students. In many cases, Army recruiters alone were visiting a particular school every other day, or more than 90 times over the course of a 180-day school year. To take one example, Springfield Central High School in western Massachusetts hosted Army recruiters on 93 separate occasions during the 2012-13 school year. Fitchburg High School, in the eastern part of the state, was the leader in this category with more than 100 visits from Army recruiters.
Visits target JROTC students. Recruiters for all military branches appear to have a special interest in reaching JROTC cadets. At a number of schools, half of a recruiter’s time on campus was spent in front of JROTC students. Years after DoD Memorandum 50 had supposedly been rescinded, severing the link between JROTC and recruiting, it seems that JROTC units still maintain close relationships with local military recruiters.
From Draft NOtices, July-September 2016
—Amanda Jordan-Starks
The Panama Papers followed in the footsteps of Wikileaks, Snowden and others to promote economic and political transparency in an increasingly militarized society. The massive data leak of 11.5 million documents from Panamanian-based law firm Mossack Fonseca covered a period of almost 40 years. The greatest controversy includes evidence that many companies and individuals around the world use 320,000 offshore accounts for suspected money laundering, arms and drug deals, and tax avoidance.
The Panama Papers enabled investigative reporters to “follow the money” with billionaire George Soros, who was revealed as having holdings in the Carlyle Group under a mostly secretive financial entity called the Quantum Group of Funds (QGF). The irony is that Soros is a premier donor of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, one of the principle groups leaking the Panama Papers. Carlyle has had deep ties to the military-industrial complex for decades, through weapons contracts and high-level security services. It has greatly profited from the War on Terrorism, and even the Saudi family of Osama bin Laden had holdings in the Carlyle Group for a time. Soros invests in many non-profits involved in regime change operations from Ukraine to Syria.
Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS
When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:
