Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, July-September 2008

— Rick Jahnkow
    

California has moved closer to passing Assembly Bill 2994, which would grant high school students greater protection from aggressive military recruiters.

The legislation, introduced by Assembly members Sally Lieber (D-Mountain View) and Loni Hancock (D-East SF Bay), passed the Assembly education and veterans affairs committees and was approved by the full Assembly by a vote of 45 to 33. It then passed the Senate education committee and was headed for a floor vote in the Senate at the time of our newsletter publication. If passed by the Senate, it will go to Gov. Schwarzenegger for his signature or veto.

AB 2994 would make it easier for parents and students to learn about and exercise their right to opt out when high schools release student names, addresses and phone numbers to military recruiters and colleges. The release of this information is required for schools to receive federal education funds, though parents and students can ask to be excluded. AB 2994 would place the opt-out notice on the emergency information cards that are often completed when students register for school. Check-off boxes would be included to separately indicate if a student’s contact information is to be withheld from the military and/or colleges.

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From Draft NOtices, November-December 2002


— Marion Morgan
    

November 30, 2002, will mark the 92nd anniversary of the death of American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, more commonly known as Mark Twain. While many are familiar with Twain for his fiction, most notably Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his political writings comprise a significant and important part of his work. Twain's incisive and scathing speeches, essays, and sketches on America's imperialistic and militaristic practices — and the support drummed up for them in the name of patriotism — drew widespread attention both in this country and abroad.

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From Draft NOtices, January—March 2008

— Michael Lujan Bevacqua
    

A part of the U.S., yet apart from it; a colony in a world where colonialism supposedly no longer exists; the “tip of America’s spear” in Asia — welcome to Guam, USA. This is a place where the residents, including its indigenous population, the Chamorros, are U.S. citizens, yet cannot vote for president and have no voting delegate in Congress. And notwithstanding the promise of American democracy, all federal laws apply to Guam and supercede all local laws.

Despite this colonial relationship, or perhaps because of it, most U.S. Americans know nothing about Guam – not only that it is a colony, but that it is their colony. The place of Guam in the U.S. American consciousness is constituted through a paradox of everyday popular ambiguity and ignorance along with an almost solid military certainty. Because of this, in U.S. popular culture (such as blogs, movies, newspapers, magazines, and novels), Guam has been represented as literally anything – a foreign country, a tropical paradise, an island full of cannibals or exiled homosexuals, and Guatemala.

If the average U.S. American is unaware of or unclear about Guam, this perspective is not shared by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), for whom Guam is one thing only: a military installation. From the moment it was first taken during the Spanish American War in 1898, in order to provide a transit point for U.S. military and economic interests into Asia, this mindset has governed U.S. policy and control over the island.

In the century since it was taken, Guam has played a critical role in every U.S. conflict in the Asia-Pacific region, including as a forward base; a site for the transportation of U.S. troops and bombs into Japan, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East; and a transit site for the evacuation of refugees from Vietnam, Iraq or Burma. This role continues today, evidenced most recently in the magazine Foreign Policy, which listed Guam as one of the six most important U.S. bases in the world.

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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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