Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, October-December 2015

— Seth Kershner
    

The recent release of the 2014 DoD STARBASE annual report provides an opportunity to reflect on this little-known part of the Pentagon’s school militarization program. While the government shutdown in late 2013 left it in a weakened state, starting this year the military plans to extend the reach of STARBASE beyond its primary constituency — fifth-grade students in Title 1 schools — and to march its merry band of “mentors” into middle schools.

Supported by more than $20 million in annual funding from the Pentagon, in FY14 more than 40,000 fifth-grade students participated in DoD STARBASE at 58 locations in 31 states (including Puerto Rico). Students receive five days of instruction. Normally, school districts are only required to pay for the cost of transporting children to the military bases (the majority run by the National Guard) that host the program.

Besides promoting “knowledge and interest” in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), a “primary goal” of STARBASE, according to the annual report, is to generate more “positive attitudes towards military people” and to stimulate student interest in “STEM careers in the military.”

The program has been part of the national school militarism picture since 1993, when Congress first dedicated funds to support a national roll-out of STARBASE. It was a landmark year for school militarization. In addition to green-lighting STARBASE, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1993 also created the Troops to Teachers program and the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program, and allowed the high school Junior ROTC to double in size.

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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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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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