Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, March-April 2005


— Jorge Mariscal
    

When students at Seattle Central Community College forced military recruiters off their campus in January, they fired an illumination round over a new front in the counter-recruitment movement. Traditionally both recruiters and activists have considered high schools as their primary site of engagement. Today, with the Pentagon straining to maintain sufficient force levels and some military branches failing to meet recruiting quotas, your local community college campus has joined your local high school as the target of aggressive recruitment campaigns.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, two-year colleges in the United States are where one finds well over 50% of all minority students in higher education. More than half of all these students will never finish a four-year baccalaureate program, and for some groups (Latinos, for example) graduation and transfer rates to four-year colleges are especially low. Of all Latinos who enroll in two-year college programs, 40% will leave within four years without a degree.

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From Draft NOtices, March-April 2005


— Emily Roxworthy
    

Mainstream media outlets have long compared activist demonstrations to street theater, both as a way of emphasizing the decentralized, grass-roots, and live nature of activists' tactics and as a way of ridiculing activism as outdated, obnoxiously "in-your-face," and melodramatic. This portrayal was certainly clear in The San Diego Union-Tribune coverage of those San Diegans protesting Bush's January 20, 2005, presidential inauguration. The article began by stressing the rudimentary nature of the protesters' rally: "People banged pots and pans and waved banners and chanted and cheered, but none of that was in celebration," staff writer Michael Stetz wrote. Stetz went on to repeatedly stress the predictably "unhappy" attitude of the protesters and closed his piece with the reactions of passive bystanders to the protest: "One man was heard to say: 'Anybody tell them the '70s were, like, 30 years ago?'" and two tourists from Phoenix who "didn't mind the commotion" as they dined on sushi in the Gaslamp Quarter remarked, "It's like dinner theater." Likewise, a San Francisco Chronicle article, headlined "Whether Bush's fife and drums or San Francisco's howls, pageantry ruled on Inauguration Day," shuttled between the theatrical elements of inauguration spectacles in Washington and anti-inauguration rallies in San Francisco, suggesting that both sides are complicit in a cycle of representations and counter-representations that are "the way we conduct politics more and more in this country, a showdown of appearances and photo opportunities, planned spontaneity and 'authorized protests.'"

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From Draft NOtices, January-February, 2005


— Rick Jahnkow
    

Despite 2005 being the start of a second presidential term for George W. Bush, this year may bring together a number of factors that will offer the antiwar movement an important opportunity to shorten the U.S. occupation of Iraq and begin to reverse the decades-long growth of militarism in this country. However, to take advantage of this opportunity, the antiwar movement will have to think critically about its emphasis on symbolic war protest and look more closely at strategies for interfering with the flow of human resources needed for war, especially through counter-recruitment organizing.

As the year began, it should have been clear to everyone that the neocon plan for the Middle East pursued by the Bush administration had run into a brick wall. The invasion and occupation of Iraq is now the quagmire that many predicted, and U.S. actions in the region have created less political stability instead of more. Meanwhile, total annual spending on war and the military has reached almost half a trillion dollars, which is being financed by running up major deficits and proposing budget cuts in domestic programs that will generate much anger in the coming months toward Bush and his Republican majority. The increasing reports of Republican realists publicly criticizing Bush policies — especially over Iraq — indicate that beneath the surface, opinion against the neocons is growing even within the conservative base of Bush's own party.

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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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