Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, July-September 2015

— Rick Jahnkow
    

Assembly Bill 82 passed the California Assembly on June 2. The vote was 73-2, which cleared the way for it to move on to the senate side of the state legislature. As of this writing, it was scheduled for a June 30 hearing before the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee. If it passes that committee, it will go to an appropriations committee, which is where the same proposal died six previous times.

The bill states that in order to apply for a license or license renewal, males would have to give their permission for the California Department of Motor Vehicles to automatically register them with the Selective Service System, the federal agency that would conduct any future military draft. The requirement would apply to all male license applicants up to age 26, regardless of their citizenship or residency status.

Opponents of the bill have included groups that advocate on behalf of undocumented immigrants. AB 82 concerns them because one of the federal agencies that SSS has a formal data-sharing relationship with is the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Department of Homeland Security agency that oversees actions taken against people who are without legal residency. California now issues drivers’ licenses with a special waiver for individuals who cannot prove they are legal residents, and the state licensing law says that their residency information in DMV records cannot be used as a basis for investigating or detaining them. The state, however, would have no legal power to regulate what USCIS might do with information it receives from SSS, including DMV data identifying individuals who are without proof of legal residency.

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From Draft NOtices, July-September 2015

— Joey King, Veterans For Peace board member and chair of VFP’s Latin America Working Group


    
The U.S. Marines will soon deploy to Central America, according to a May 9 report in the Miami Herald (and Stars and Stripes). Most of the 280 troops will be headed to Honduras, which, since the U.S.–backed coup in 2009, has become the “murder capital of the world.”

Veterans For Peace does not buy Pentagon claims that the Marine deployment is about disaster preparedness. Over a century of U.S. intervention in Latin America has been a continuing disaster for the peoples of the region, as explained below.

U.S. interventionism in Latin America continues some 191 years after throwing off Spanish colonial rule. The Miami Herald article reports that approximately 280 U.S. Marines are landing in Central America any day now. The operation has no codename, but it's the fruit of about a year's planning by the U.S. Southern Command to insert a newly formed expeditionary outfit into the U.S.-run swath of the Soto Cano air base in Honduras for about 200 days — the longest, largest known Marine deployment onto Central American turf in years. About 90 of the Marines will be going to Guatemala, El Salvador and Belize.

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From Draft NOtices, July-September 2015

— Rodrigo de la Rosa
    

More and more cities have begun to pave the way toward economic justice by supporting the nationwide initiative of increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Cities such as Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland, OR, have committed themselves to this goal within the next few years. In states such as Texas, where the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, this change would more than double income in households earning less than $15,000 per year. Although the campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour began as a fast food worker campaign, it has now been implemented in many other service sector jobs and has ultimately become a working-class campaign. In California, where the minimum wage is currently $9 per hour, a single mother or father earns $17,280 per year; that’s $6,570 below the poverty level for a single person without dependents. In San Diego the campaign to earn $15 an hour has been going for a little over a year and has already gained an outstanding amount of support.

This campaign not only advocates for economic justice, but it will also have an impact on military recruitment, because the most powerful factor that drives people in working-class communities into the ranks of the military is POVERTY.

High school students in low-income communities have programs such as JROTC that serve as a gateway and recruitment tool for the military. Military recruiters conduct more class visitations and attend more career fairs than college recruiters in low-income schools. Meanwhile, programs such as JROTC and military recruiters are much less present in schools in affluent communities.

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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:

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